4.5 18th-Century Culture and Arts

Rococo was a style popular from about the 1720s to the 1770s, especially in France. It used pastel colors, curving lines, gilded decoration and playful scenes of aristocrats in gardens, love and leisure. It was lighter and more intimate than the grand Baroque, suited to elegant townhouses and salons rather than palaces and churches.

Key painters were Antoine Watteau, François Boucher and Jean-Honoré Fragonard. Fragonard's The Swing (1767) shows a young woman in a frilly dress swinging in a lush garden while a young man gazes up at her. Critics later attacked Rococo as frivolous, a symbol of a pampered aristocracy.

Neoclassicism, from the 1760s on, revived the clean lines, balance and moral seriousness of ancient Greek and Roman art. Excavations at Herculaneum and Pompeii, Roman towns buried by a volcano, sparked new interest in ancient styles. The movement fit Enlightenment values of reason and civic virtue.

Jacques-Louis David's Oath of the Horatii (1784) shows three Roman brothers swearing to fight for their city while the women of the family collapse in grief. Its message of patriotic self-sacrifice made it popular with future revolutionaries. David later became the leading artist of the French Revolution, painting The Death of Marat (1793), and then of Napoleon. In architecture, buildings like the Panthéon in Paris copied Roman temples.

Literacy rose, especially in towns, among the middle classes and in Protestant areas. The novel, a long fictional story about ordinary characters, became popular. Examples include Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740). Newspapers and magazines spread; London's first daily paper appeared in 1702. Lending libraries and reading clubs let people read books they couldn't buy, and cheap almanacs and chapbooks reached rural readers.

Censorship existed, but a large underground trade sold banned books, including scandalous attacks on the French court as well as philosophy.

Art and writing increasingly reflected the values of commercial, middle-class society. Earlier Dutch painters like Rembrandt and Vermeer had already painted merchants and quiet homes for middle-class buyers, and novels like Pamela praised the virtue of an ordinary servant.

Comfortable households wanted privacy. New homes had separate rooms for different uses, including small private retreats like the boudoir, a lady's sitting room. As part of the consumer revolution, families bought porcelain dishes, mirrors, framed prints for the walls and cotton and linen for curtains and bedding. Outside the home, people spent leisure time in coffeehouses, taverns, theaters and opera houses.

Travel accounts, natural history and popular plays also showed Europeans images of peoples outside Europe. Some writers used them to question European customs, as Montesquieu did in Persian Letters (1721), where two Persian visitors mock French society.

Historians call these spaces the public sphere, where private people came together to form public opinion. Public opinion became a force that governments had to reckon with. Music also changed, from the Baroque of Bach and Handel to the Classical style of Haydn and Mozart, with public concerts open to paying audiences.

• Salons: gatherings in private homes, often hosted by educated women such as Madame Geoffrin in Paris, where writers, nobles and officials discussed ideas. Hostesses guided the conversation and connected thinkers.
• Coffeehouses: public places where men of different ranks read newspapers and debated politics and business.
• Masonic lodges, academies and reading societies: clubs where members discussed ideas as equals.