from academic strictures of any kind. These spaces could also be used in order to exploit through
patronage rather than the shop window the commercial opportunities presented by expanding markets for
art. Fragonard had not studied at the Académie royale in Paris when he won the coveted Rome Prize in
- Although he subsequently developed a position of respect at the Académie, his relations with the
institution later cooled so that his career focused increasingly on works produced in his lodgings at the
Louvre, free from the conventions of the Académie itself (Percival, 2012, 3). This allowed him to devote
time to subjects and styles such as his “fantasy figures,” half portrait and half imaginative improvisations.
His distinctive style, with its loose brushwork, facilitated swift production and a timely response to high
public demand, especially in the 1760s, for paintings in this genre. In similar vein, Gainsborough was a
member of the Royal Academy in London but fell out with the institution following a row in 1783 over the
ways in which his paintings should be hung at the Academy’s 1784 exhibition (Fenton, 2006, 122–123;
Solkin, 2001, 16). He then exhibited works at his own home, exploiting, like Fragonard, the market for
paintings produced with the looser brushwork that stood against academic preferences for a precise
finish. The fashionable nature of his work was demonstrated by the fact that his career also continued to
benefit from royal patronage. The careers of both of these artists demonstrate the relatively autonomous
creativity possible for artists who had already established a name for themselves: they perpetuated in this
respect the relative independence of prestigious masters from the Renaissance onwards working in
socially popular genres such as portraiture. Artists’ studios remained the main locations in which
eighteenthcentury artists and apprentices learned the practical skills of painting, thus allowing some
degree of originality or personal style to develop.
Earlier in the century it had been left to exceptional artists working outside the academic fine art tradition,
for example, Hogarth, to introduce innovations in British visual culture. Many of the boldest departures
from tradition occurred toward the end of the century, as Romantic conceptions of the artist began to take
hold. The spirit of rebellion characteristic of many innovators is captured in the famous pronouncement by
William Blake (1757–1827) on Reynolds: “This Man was Hired to Depress Art” (“Annotations to Sir
Joshua Reynolds’ Discourses,” 1808). Blake’s visionary works had little connection with the Royal
Academy, of which he was not a member. Latecentury imaginative innovations in Goya’s art were
largely achieved outside the Real Academia in Madrid and, as we have seen, this artist was among those
who rebelled against the strictures of academic classicism.
In Germany, Goethe was among those writers who championed the cause of the autonomous genius. He
objected to the stifling effects of an overrational or overprescriptive approach to art. This kind of
objection to the ideology of control underlying much academic discourse was expressed with increasing
frequency. While the practice of academic artists themselves had often demonstrated that “rules” were to
be interpreted quite loosely, the establishment of professional art criticism kept a vigilant eye on the
dangers of conservatism and a doctrinaire approach. The concept of “genius” played a key role in such
defenses. In a marked reversal of Reynolds’ prescription of learning the rules in order to attain some
inventiveness, later commentators such as Alexander Gerard (1728–1795) in his 1774 Essay on Genius
recognized clearly the primary dependence of “genius” on a unique creative personality (Quilley, 2011,
16–18). Here too are the words of the art critic Diderot, in his Salon of 1765, on the oil sketches of Saint
Gregory produced by the history painter Carle Van Loo (1705–1765). As Diderot ponders the relationship
between Van Loo’s moving art and the artist’s social awkwardness, the critic offers a poetic evocation of
the creative genius: