increasingly divergent art market. As nations developed their empires, neoclassical values of beauty and
morality often came to the fore again, sometimes in order to justify the dominance of western cultures.
The patrician and Christian values upheld in the early part of the century by Shaftesbury and his
followers, such as Joseph Addison (1672–1719) and Sir Richard Steele (1672–1729), continued to serve
for many throughout the century as a moral exemplar, even when evidently under attack from sources of
corruption and dissent. These values encompassed a condemnation of ostentation, duplicity, deceit,
fanaticism, avarice, depravity, pretension and cowardice as well as a love of “virtue” and “wisdom.” To
Shaftesbury such values were gendered as male (Donald, 1996, 32, 81). It was often felt that women must
mitigate their “natural” irrationality by cultivating modesty and restraint, if they were to avoid sinking into
the vice, depravity and degeneracy captured in images such as Hogarth’s Gin Lane or his Marriage à
lamode (Donald, 1996, 11; Craske, 1997, 227). However, Hogarth’s male figures also exhibited many
vices. The most important moral value of the eighteenth century was perhaps moderation. Hogarth’s art
acknowledged the importance of pleasure; for example, the relatively healthy and modest pleasures of
drinking beer, while being opposed to excess of any kind in personal conduct, as in the contemporary love
of gindrinking so prevalent in London from the 1720s to 1750 (Riding, 2006e, 181). Scenes located in
familiar urban locations, showing rakes, procuresses, prostitutes, usurers, gamblers and the corrupt, idle
and vain, expressed biting visual satire of all social ranks (Webster, 1978, 31, 47, 60; Craske, 1997, 11,
43, 47, 64–68; Krysmanski, 1998, 399–403 Hallett, 2006a, 15; Riding, 2006b, 73–75; 2006c; 2006d,
141). Moderation was regarded as a sign of good breeding and prevented the social disorder so feared in
Britain, especially as the Revolution struck in France. Hogarth’s morality appealed to the kinds of portrait
sitters with whom he mixed: these were from mercantile, professional, ecclesiastical and scientific
backgrounds, and in them he often exemplified the “solid” virtues of directness, benevolence, energy and
lack of pretension valued in male subjects, or the modesty, politeness, “sincerity” and social ease in their
female equivalents (Hallett, 2006d, 160). In his xenophobic view of the continent, such values stood
against “foreign” refinement of an overblown or insincere kind.
In France itself, however, “politeness” and a concern with virtue also bound together the moral
aspirations of those in the middling ranks and above. The art of Greuze provided, in the middle decades
of the century, fashionable scenes of virtuous domesticity. Moral values acquired a different inflection in
distinctive political contexts. The autocracy of the French government and the power of the Catholic
Church prompted Enlightenment thinkers such as Diderot, Voltaire and Rousseau to prioritize the virtues
of tolerance, rationality and the acquisition of knowledge: they stood against ignorance, irrationality,
religious superstition and court corruption. This situation contrasted with the generally bourgeois court of
George III, which attracted less scandal (Brewer, 1997, 16, 19, 21). In both countries, however, the
general intellectual climate was against asceticism – “pleasurable living” and sociability being desirable
ideals. The pursuit of happiness was a central part of Enlightenment ideology (Porter, 2000, 262–275).
There was amongst the French intelligentsia a backlash against official Catholic moral codes, which were
distrustful of the senses. Many of Diderot’s critical judgments on Greuze’s swooning maidens are
problematic precisely because they attempt to reconcile sympathy for injured innocence with a
“pleasurable” masculine desire (Walsh, 1994, 162–181).
The idea of “Nature” as an ideal moral standard was important in ethical debates across Europe,
especially once the ideas of Rousseau, popularized in his international bestselling 1761 novel, Julie, ou
la Nouvelle Héloïse (Julie, or the New Heloise), had taken hold. In Britain the theologian George
Turnbull (1698–1748) stated in his 1740 A Treatise on Ancient Painting, Containing Observations on
the Rise, Progress, and Decline of that Art Amongst the Greeks and Romans, the importance of
following the “Order in nature” in both life and the imitations of art: