references to the sense of justice, benevolence and loyalty of their protagonists: Penny’s The Marquis of
Granby relieving a Sick Soldier ( 1764 ) exemplifies such trends (Abrams, 1985, 70; Solkin, 1993, 170–
172, 205). This transposition of private feeling to history subjects worked well, however, only when
handled by artists possessing the full range of skills normally expected of a history painter. Greuze’s use
of the artistic conventions of sensibility, in which the poses, expressions and compositional contexts of
figures often emphasized their vulnerability, was less successful when he transferred these to grand
history painting, as in his reception piece for the Académie royale, his Septimius Severus and Caracalla
(1769) (Crow, 1985, 164). Much of his failure was due to an inability to match visually, and with
sufficient technical expertise, the gravity inherent in the antique narratives he chose to represent.
Wright of Derby’s An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, a genre painting on a grand scale,
demonstrated within genre painting itself the kinds of familial and affective bonds that might appeal to the
growing ranks of the commercially successful classes who featured in such scenes. Angelica Kauffman’s
portraits represented their female subjects in a way that appealed to the bonds of affection that might be
formed imaginatively with viewers who moved in the circles of the “polite,” their expressions consisting
of the kind of melting tenderness that flattered viewers implicitly for their own capacity for intense natural
feeling (Rosenthal, 1992, 105). The bonds of feeling openly celebrated in such works contrast with works
earlier in the century in which sentimentalism had not enjoyed such sway; for example, Hogarth’s satirical
works, in which sentiment was offset by humor and ridicule. Hogarth drew freely on history painters’
repertoire of facial expressions; and related his narrative series to contemporary themes in literature, the
theater and society; but his use of satire and realism in these series had served a more Puritan agenda, in
which uninhibited indulgence in feeling was slightly suspect (Webster, 1978, 32; Riding, 2006a, 34).
Questions of Modernity
A common historiographical approach in discussions of the relationship between eighteenthcentury art
and moral values is to describe it as a progression from the amoral, pleasure seeking art of the early
century (e.g. in the taste for the rococo and the decorative) to the moral gravity, elevating patriotism and
public virtues of David’s antique subjects, a process aided by reformist ideals of the Enlightenment that
held sway across Europe. Thomas Crow characterizes this commonly perceived progression as a
trajectory from the sensual and the private to the classical and didactic, instigated in part by La Font de
SaintYenne’s antirococo and anticommercialism polemic (Crow, 1985, 6–7). Matthew Craske has
indicated the nineteenthcentury origins of “degeneration to regeneration” arthistorical narratives
relating to the eighteenth century, which sometimes cast Boucher and his rococo colleagues in the role of
villains (Craske, 1997, 226–229, 247–248). There is certainly a great deal of evidence from eighteenth
century art criticism that concerns about the declining moral vigor of art ran throughout the century.
Debates on luxury acted as a focal point for these. Rousseau wrote eloquently on the subject in his 1750 A
Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, in which he refers to artists who created rococo works: