3
Markets, Publics, Expert Opinions
An extensive market for art developed in the eighteenth century. This was not of course the first period in
which art had been traded. Particularly from the Renaissance, monarchs, religious and political leaders
had commissioned and purchased art on a significant scale. In the seventeenth century, and particularly in
northern Europe, a growing merchant class had also played an important role in the market for art. As new
and expanding social groups wished to buy art, they shaped its development. Issues of social, religious,
moral, philosophical or political allegiances were often a decisive factor in such developments.
However, the European market for art is considered to have reached a much wider public and to have
achieved a more modern complexity in the eighteenth century, when culture became “commodified” on an
unprecedented scale (Solkin, 1993, 1–2). From the middle of the century, cultural institutions in many
European countries, particularly in Britain, France and Germany, but also in important Italian Grand Tour
cities, acknowledged a broader “public” for art, that extended far beyond the traditional (“premodern”)
circles of court and church to artistic societies, clubs and academies, both formal and informal, whose
members developed, along with many domestic buyers, selfconsciously critical views and preferences.
Markets and Patrons
Royal and aristocratic patronage remained important, particularly in those countries where a broader art
market had not yet developed. Royally sponsored porcelain works in many cities (including Berlin, St
Petersburg and Stockholm) boosted specialist palace collections (Touati and Flemberg, 2013). In Britain,
royal households had favored since Tudor and Stuart times portraits and historical works by artists from
northern Europe, such as Anthony Van Dyck (1599–1641), Hans Holbein the Younger (1497–1543) and
Rubens (Vaughan, 2008, 57), but Georgian royal households also bought the work of contemporary artists
such as Canaletto, Roubiliac, Liotard and Kneller. George I (reigned 1714–1727) had a relatively small
budget for art but awarded major commissions for decorative art to James Thornhill (1675–1734), who
completed the massive ceiling painting in the Great Hall at Greenwich Hospital, and to William Kent
(1685–1748), a lover of Italian art who oversaw the redecoration of Kensington Palace. Duke Christian
Ludwig II of MecklenbergSchwerin (in power 1747–1756), who governed a principality in what is now
northeastern Germany, was an important patron for Oudry (Bailey, 2007, 14; Frank, 2007, 31–57). The
portrait artist and genre painter Johan Zoffany built his career initially through court appointments and
commissions at Thurn und Taxis and Trier (both part of the Habsburg Empire), London, Florence, Parma
and Vienna. Work as a court artist carried a higher status than that of court musicians and actors, and in
London in particular Zoffany’s work for George III (reigned 1760–1820) brought him into contact with a
much wider range of clients, as the British court was linked with other potential client groups such as
parliamentarians and politicians (Postle, 2011, 75–99).
While the British court dealt directly with artists it wished to commission, French royal commissions
were often negotiated through the various Directors of Public Buildings, in consultation with the Director
of the Académie royale or the royally appointed First Painter to the King. Court patronage remained
important through to the nineteenth century in Stockholm, Copenhagen, Dresden, Berlin, Vienna, Madrid,
Warsaw and St Petersburg. Stanislav August Poniatowski of Poland (reigned 1764–1795) was, until the
loss in 1795 of his country’s independence, among those monarchs who funded the studies of native artists
abroad, so that they could learn more of painting as a liberal art and move beyond the approaches of the