Figure 5.5 Philippe Mercier: The Sense of Sight, oil on canvas, 132.1 × 153.7 cm, 1744–1747. Yale
Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.
Source: Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.Viewing, Consumerism and Luxury
Representations of the acts of viewing and seeing, whether in the context of the public exhibition, shop,
private collection or domestic life, could provoke ideas about art works as objects of consumerism.
Luxury and the acquisition of material goods were among those preoccupations that “polite” society
enjoyed yet viewed as a potential threat to more disinterested moral standards. The Art and Antique Shop
(La Tienda del anticuario, 1772) (Figure 5.6) by the Spanish court artist Luis Paret y Alacazar (1746–
1799) represents in quite a sympathetic manner a shop setting in which customers are presented with a
dazzling array of paintings, rugs, drapes and ornaments that recalls the free play of artistic and decorative
objects in rococo interiors. Later, Goya was to adopt a less positive attitude to Spanish attitudes to finery
and artifice (Craske, 1997, 170–171). There was no straightforward response, among Enlightenment