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| George Stubbs Lion and Lioness 1771 oil on canvas Museum of Fine Arts, Boston |
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| Marco Ricci Landscape with a Woman and Child ca. 1725-30 oil on canvas Royal Collection, Great Britain |
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| Luis Meléndez Still Life with Pigeons, Onions, Bread and Kitchen Utensils ca. 1772 oil on canvas Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut |
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| Jan Frans van Bloemen Landscape in the Roman Campagna ca. 1700-1740 oil on panel Walters Art Museum, Baltimore |
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| Antoine Rivalz An Allegory, probably of the Peace of Utrecht ca. 1713 oil on canvas Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Henry Fuseli The Night Hag visiting Lapland Witches (from Paradise Lost) 1796 oil on canvas Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Giovanni David A Vestal Virgin Entombed ca. 1775 watercolor Museum of Fine Arts, Boston |
"Since the beginning of the century an ongoing debate dissected the real nature of the Beautiful, whether it was possible to define its exact properties and fix its contours. While most intellectuals simply identified beauty with the classical ideal based on harmony, grace, and proportion, others mused about an unfathomable variety and complexity inherent in it and the impossibility of reaching a universally comprehensive definition. In issues related to taste and its rules, the English thinker Edmund Burke had a pivotal role, for in his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757) he held that next to a positive, traditional idea of beauty resting on principles of harmony and perfection, there is undeniably another idea dictated by passions and feelings that mixes pleasure with pain and fear: it is the Sublime. While rational, intellectual activity prefers a harmonious, positive beauty, one cannot deny that humankind possesses a powerful emotional universe that can be seduced by what is seen as threatening or arouses fear and insecurity. The Beautiful and the Sublime are therefore set in a kind of antithesis, like reason and feeling, yet their roots, in the final analysis, are the same: it is pleasure, the attraction felt by the senses. In the wake of the polemics unleashed by this theory, a taste began to develop in art for a beauty that is no longer harmonious, but ambiguous and unsettling."
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| Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin The Kitchen Table ca. 1755 oil on canvas Museum of Fine Arts, Boston |
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| Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin Still Life with Teapot, Grapes, Chestnuts and a Pear ca. 1764 oil on canvas Museum of Fine Arts, Boston |
"A master of silence and light, Chardin's work is the antithesis of the Parisian court art and the fashions of his time. He is one of the few great artists who did not make the prescribed trip to Rome or attend regular courses at the Academy. His success in 1728 from his first still lifes – studied geometric compositions – gradually brought him fame. The intimate, touching poetry of his still-life painting is amazing. There are understated arrangements made precious by whites and pale blues, a slight blurring that throws a gentle mist over the profiles, a thin layer of dust falling silently on things – everyday, humble, banal household implements and tools. His brushstroke is thick with dense impastos . . . "
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| Hubert Robert Stairway of the Washerwomen 1796 oil on paper, mounted on canvas Museum of Fine Arts, Boston |
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| Antoine-François Callet Ceres begging for Jupiter's Thunderbolt after the Kidnapping of her daughter Proserpine 1777 oil on canvas Museum of Fine Arts, Boston |
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| Nicolaes van Haeften Portrait of a Family in an Interior ca. 1700 oil on canvas Museum of Fine Arts, Boston |
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| John Smibert Portrait of Daniel, Peter and Andrew Oliver 1732 oil on canvas Museum of Fine Arts, Boston |
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| John Robert Cozens The Two Great Temples at Paestum ca. 1782 watercolor Victoria & Albert Museum |
"A liking for ruins developed hand in hand with archaeological discoveries and the study of the Graeco-Roman Classical world; it was an aesthetic that exalted ancient remains, a sacred testimony of a grand but lost heritage. Adding a ruin to a painted landscape or to a real garden could at least recover the spirit of the noble past. A landscape so transformed gained intense symbolic value and an intellectual flavor that went beyond mere aesthetic pleasure. The settecento penchant for ruins revived the preceding century's memento mori, a meditation on the world's transience – this time by means of a sort of architectural vanitas. The inclusion of ancient ruins – faithfully reproduced extant ruins and, especially, invented ones in imagined places – in painted landscapes became customary. The architectural backdrops gave the paintings an ineffable feeling of nostalgia, of noble, heroic values fading along with most of the physical remnants."
– quoted passages from European Art of the Eighteenth Century by Daniela Tarabra, translated by Rosanna M. Giammanco Frongia (Getty Museum, 2008)