establishment could rally its support if under attack. La Font’s rare, virulent assault on contemporary art at
the Salons invoked a plethora of counterattacks. Cochin was among those who, as Secretary to the
Académie royale, tried to moderate the virulent attacks of critics. In 1763, he published his Les
Misotechniques aux enfers, an indictment of the views of La Font de Saint Yenne and his followers,
including Jean de Jullienne (Berger, 1999, 182–186) and of all illinformed critics. The art critic Le
Blanc also circulated views in defense of rococo artists (Crow, 1985, 7), as did Coypel, through his
Dialogue by Monsieur Coypel, First Painter to the King, on the Exhibition of Paintings at the Salon of
the Louvre, in 1747 (Dialogue de M.Coypel, premier peintre du Roi, sur l’exposition des tableaux dans
le Salon du Louvre, en 1747) (Berger, 1999, 186–191). Cochin insisted in 1767 that critics should put
their names to their publications so that they could no longer hide behind anonymity and, in 1787, he
lobbied d’Angiviller, thenDirector of Public Buildings, in a further attempt to curb destructive criticism
(Wrigley, 1993, 100–155). His efforts did suppress some negative Salon criticism, but were hampered by
the fact that many members of the court and the wealthy elite of Paris enjoyed and encouraged pamphlet
wars and lively assaults on artists.
Meanwhile, many critics had gained a reputation for selfseeking publicity stunts. Laugier’s request to
establish a new monthly review of the arts provoked the following cool reception from Cochin:
This sort of publication can degenerate in no time to criticisms, mockery, and baseless judgements.
Any writer will soon persuade himself that negativity amuses the public and can sell his work. Self
interest runs the show, and it will become no more than a periodical series of insults which would
aggrieve our artists, close the studios, and ruin public exhibitions, which are more useful to the arts
than are the arguments of literary men who know next to nothing.
(Cited in Crow 1985, 9)A turbulent critical culture returned in the 1770s and 1780s, when Terray (Director of Public Buildings in
1773–1774) relaxed Cochin’s reforms. France was exceptional in the virulence and conflicts of its art
critics. In Britain it was much more common to know and write about literature than painting, although
Reynolds’ lectures at the Royal Academy brought some advancement in this respect. Critics such as
Shaftesbury and Jonathan Richardson, and newspaper and journal reviews such as those in The Tatler,
The Spectator and The Gentleman’s Magazine did much to educate (and shape) the art public, as did the
founding of a specialist journal, The Artist’s Repository and the Drawing Magazine (1785–1795).
Britain’s first art periodical, Charles Taylor’s Artist’s Repository, was launched in 1785. As in France,
there was a range of registers used in the writing of criticism, from serious philosophical discourse to
gossip, satire and the burlesque (Kriz, 2001, 62). Much negative criticism was, however, defused through
satire and, at least outside the professional disputes of academicians, there was a greater emphasis on a
public consensus of taste than in France. Reynolds, Richardson and Shaftesbury wrote for and helped to
mold this relatively consensual, genteel art public (Solkin, 1993, 248–259). Differences in emphasis in
critical writings tended to be more subtly graduated but could be polarized in response to developments
on the continent, such as the French Revolution or American War of Independence, which led many
(mainly of Tory sympathies) to declare their allegiances to a more conservative, aristocratic (and
implicitly royalist) taste (Hoock, 2003, 130–135). Edmund Burke was among those who wrote against
French attacks on the monarchy. Both Hogarth and William Blake declared their sympathy for
disadvantaged sections of society. They also expressed resentment, the former in his 1753 The Analysis of
Beauty, and Blake in his annotations on Reynolds’ Discourses, of the power of the Royal Academy.
However, Hogarth’s “waving line” aesthetic was essentially an aspect of rococo aristocratic taste and he
painted some aristocratic subjects; Blake was not anticlassical in his tastes: neat alignments of culture
and politics were, as on the continent, quite rare.