Chardin’s genre paintings, could be valued for its formal values (use of color, light and composition) and
appeal to the senses rather than for its moral content. However, there was a compulsion among the wider
public to “textualize” such images through the addition, often in engraved copies, of explanatory captions
that turned them into moral emblems or narratives (Crow, 1985, 137; Wrigley, 1993, 297–298). Prints
became, from the middle of the century, a popular vehicle for the ideals of domestic, sentimentalized
moral values (Retford, 2006, 17). Private scenes from the life of the “polite” became a more promising
ground for moral edification at times when faith in the ability of the history genre to embody such noble
aims was relatively low. Through the middle decades of the eighteenth century, genre paintings in France
began to place significant emphasis on moral themes. Theorists began to see the “naïve” or everyday as
an alternative means of moral instruction to the grand style of history, their “truth” replacing an emphasis
on the sublime or heroic (B. Gaehtgens, 2003, 52–56).In Britain too, private life became the most fertile
context for the dissemination of moral messages or themes in art, as the values of civic humanism,
formerly the preserve of the elite, were transformed into a wider public discourse of virtue and sentiment
(Solkin, 1993, 169).
Toward the end of the century, however, art free of any overt moralizing function became more common.
Artists such as Rowlandson, Barry and Fuseli openly prioritized (in the case of Rowlandson) humor and
social satire, or (in the case of the others) drama or the terrors of the essentially amoral sublime (Craske,
1997, 27, 183–188). Rowlandson built on the tradition of Hogarth and other earlier satirists in using
humor to provide a kind of social and moral selfregulation that was the antithesis of the ambition of
grand history painting to make moral pronouncements from on high (Craske, 2000, 11–13, 35–36). The
use of satirical or subversive prints was effective in a climate of taste sufficiently consensual to make
evident the targets of their humor, and in a climate that was the product of an openminded context of
“civic accord” (Craske, 2000, 11). The novelist Henry Fielding (1707–1754) had helped the public to
distinguish between seriousminded satire and mere entertainment or caricature, distancing Hogarth’s
works from the latter. Even grotesque or caricatural distortions became more acceptable later in the
century, however, as the public saw humor and social comment as mutually reinforcing. The grotesque
bodies of Rowlandson’s figures provided a counterpoint to idealized classical figures or to the “polite”
modes of representation typical of genteel conversation pieces (Kriz, 2001, 62).
The victims or targets of satirical prints in Britain rarely prosecuted caricaturists or printsellers for
libel, choosing instead to buy up all offending copies of a print run: this happened in the case of prints
mocking the Prince of Wales. In postRevolutionary France similar prints on the nation’s leading citizens
brought at most warnings issued by the judiciary (Donald, 1996, 15–16). Satire became increasingly
valued as the sign of a politically free nation in which free speech might thrive and, as the century wore
on, as a vehicle for good humor rather than venomous lampoons. This development was marked in France
after the end of the Revolution, during which satirical prints (especially those aimed at the royal family)
had reached new depths of savagery (Donald, 1996, 31–34). The selfordering society, able to regulate
its moral standards through standing back and scrutinizing its own follies and foibles, and able to share on
a wider basis the cultural references to allow this, contrasted with earlier ideals of court or patrician
leadership that had seemed to demand a more explicit form of didacticism. Social and moral satire
became gentrified as, in the hands of Rowlandson and others, it changed its emphasis from morally
incisive comment to gentlemanly ribbing (Donald, 1996, 34–35, 75–108).