time to appeal to those who sought a freer style of painting in which looser brushwork and amoral subject
matter flattered older, aristocratic tastes (Barker, 2005, 115–119). Greuze’s reputation as an
accomplished painter of portraits began to outshine his efforts to instil through genre painting the kind of
moral gravity consonant with reformist Enlightenment values.
During the French Revolution the moralizing potential of genre paintings, now more prevalent in the
Salons, found fresh resonance in the new political climate. A new emphasis on family values, freedom
and Nature was commonly expressed. Children began to be represented as freer and more spontaneous
and not, as before, as conventionbound miniature adults (Kayser, with Salmon and Hugues, 2003, 14).
Notions of the family were deployed in a polemical way, the concept of the “fatherland” being central to
the Revolution’s ideology. Due in part to the influence of Rousseau, children were often represented in
family scenes as embodiments of the kind of natural innocence that had preceded a corrupt society
(Schama, 1989, 770).
In Britain, contemporary experiences of empire; for example, through images of sea voyages and
shipwrecks, were represented in an emotive way in order to assert the values of sentiment, family,
community, heroism and sacrifice increasingly identified as core elements of a national identity (Quilley,
2011, 113–164).
The cult of sensibility has often been viewed retrospectively as inauthentic or shallow; as a conflicting
nexus of feelings that evoked “virtuous” responses infused by sexual impulses: a charge increasingly laid
against the responses of male viewers to Greuze’s seductively wilting heroines. In the eighteenth century
itself the responses of Diderot and the art critic Mathon de la Cour initiated a tradition of the “Greuze
girl” as a moral enigma representing, like the Houdon figure discussed above, both the kind of lost
innocence that might evoke paternal responses and a more provocative voluptuousness evident in an age
of “modern” ideas on sexuality (Fort, 2007, 142–143; LajerBurcharth, 2007, 201–207; Barker, 2012b,
86–87, 93). The mode for sensibility has also been suspected of arousing the facile sensations associated
with those experienced at popular theater performances. Audiences wept copiously while viewing a new
style of bourgeois drama focusing on issues from contemporary life (Ledbury, 1997; Barker, 2005, 3–9;
Fort, 2007, 130). However, sentimentalism in art enjoyed in the eighteenth century a more positive
reception. It was regarded initially as an authentic and welcome reaction against artifice, and as a badge
of social and moral virtue (Brewer, 1997, 113–114, 118–121). In Britain, its reputation suffered toward
the end of the century, when it was seen increasingly, and in its more extreme forms, as an unpatriotic
surrender to the pernicious influence of “foreign” thinkers such as Rousseau and Goethe. The latter’s The
Sorrows of Young Werther (Die Leiden des jungen Werther, 1774), an epistolary novel in the mode of
Rousseau’s Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse, dwelled on the solipsistic emotions of its hero in a way that
undermined more socially unifying forms of feeling. Ironically, the concern with subjective feeling that the
cult of sensibility had fostered led, at times, to a taste for intense introspection that could be harnessed to
validate the preeminence of the personal and individual over the rights of “fellow feeling,” in much the
same way as the commercialization of society had enabled a preoccupation with private, as well as
public, gain (Porter, 2000, 279).
Before such fears emerged on any significant scale, more positive connotations of sensibility prevailed. In
Britain, Shaftesbury’s view that “natural affections” between family members might lead to a broader,
unifying sociability, was succeeded by the views of other British thinkers such as Hume, who explored in
his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751) the importance of fellow feeling (or
“benevolence”) in forming social bonds. Many artists produced works that might promote feelings of
benevolence in their viewers and exhibited them at Vauxhall Gardens, the Foundling Hospital and other
public venues (Solkin, 1993, 11, 155–157, 168–169). Hogarth’s history paintings for the Foundling