paintings became exercises in his own creativity, as he invented stories, dialogues and witty anecdotes
prompted by paintings. Also, he showed an increasing awareness of the need for critics to develop an
understanding of the specialist, technical issues of the visual arts. He reinforced his traditional, literary
criteria of judgment (ideas on narrative, character, expression and a generally plausible representation of
an event) with those related to ocular discrimination: the use of light, color, figure groupings, drapery,
drawing and the application of paint. While Diderot placed great emphasis on his powers of empathy
when viewing art, he wished to emphasize that his taste carried the force of rational principle:
If taste is capricious, if there are no rules determining beauty, then what is it that prompts these
delicious feelings that arise so suddenly, so involuntarily, so tumultuously in the depths of our souls,
dilating or constricting them, forcing our eyes to shed tears of joy, pain, and admiration, whether in
response to some grand physical phenomenon or to an account of some great moral action?.... You’ll
never convince my heart that it’s mistaken in skipping a beat, nor my entrails that they’re wrong to
contract from profound emotion.
(From “Notes on Painting” in Diderot, 1995a, 237–238)The critic felt his “heart” was right in these matters because he could, if necessary, justify its responses
with reference to identifiable standards of beauty. He included in these an essentially classical,
harmonious relationship or unity of the different parts of a painting to its whole. His acquisition of the
technical vocabulary of art was exceptional for a nonartist. Like many eighteenthcentury theorists and
critics, Diderot sought to protect an objective, professional form of aesthetic judgment within a
framework of individualized, personal responses to art (Furbank, 1992, 276–277). In stressing the
broader relevance of personal feeling in matters of taste, he joined other eighteenthcentury
commentators who conceived of shared “public” judgments originating from the realm of private
experience. The fact that Diderot demonstrated this in the context of Greuze’s The Paralytic, a painting
concerned explicitly with the family, further emphasizes the growing interdependence of private and
public realms in social and aesthetic matters.
Theorists in other countries sought different validations of subjective experience. In Scotland the
emphasis of the philosopher Thomas Reid (1710–1796) on pure perception challenged aesthetic theories
based mainly on intellect or analysis. For Reid, no “idea” intervened between an object and our
perception of it, and it was the job of an artist to translate into paint the raw material of perception, rather
than attempting to represent any clear idea of the thing represented. His view influenced Henry Raeburn in
the 1790s in the sense that an emphasis on color, light and brushwork helped the artist to suggest rather
than clearly define the forms he represented, the analytical work of draftsmanship being much less
important. In this “looser” style of painting, the viewer would “complete” the abstract forms in question
in a commonsense way, rather than receiving or attempting to describe a clear visual description
(Macmillan, 1986, 79–80).
Unsurprisingly, given the Enlightenment’s emphasis on the acquisition of knowledge, connoisseurship
remained important through the eighteenth century. Kristel Smentek has recently illuminated the ways in
which connoisseurs such as the print collector and dealer PierreJean Mariette (1694–1774) developed
professional expertise (e.g. in matters of style) through carefully cultivated commercial and social
networking (Smentek, 2014). Important models included seventeenthcentury scholars and critics, such
as André Félibien and Roger de Piles, who had placed great emphasis on matters of attribution, the
scholarly study of art, the perception of quality, comparative discussions of artists’ techniques and the
ability to distinguish copies from originals (McClellan, 2008, 118, 157; Percival, 2012, 99). This skill set
often remained exclusive to the connoisseur, but sometimes overlapped with more gentlemanly, classical
humanist interests in art, such as those expressed by Shaftesbury, the architect and garden designer