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| Antonio Canova Three Graces Dancing ca. 1799 tempera on paper Canova Museum, Possagno |
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| Jean-Baptiste Regnault The Three Graces 1797-98 oil on canvas Louvre |
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| Giandomenico Tiepolo Minuet 1791 detached fresco Ca'Rezzonico, Venice |
The successful Tiepolo family of Venetian artists owned a villa in Zianigo near Mirano. There, the direct heir of the tradition, Giandomenico Tiepolo (1727-1804) retired during the 1790s. For his own amusement, Giandomenico proceeded to fresco many inside walls of the villa with fanciful scenes of gaiety, refining an image-vocabulary built up over a busy lifetime. In 1907 – almost exactly a century after the artist's death – these paintings were lifted from the walls and reinstalled in Venice. Today they are publicly displayed within a palazzo-museum, though (like Goya's final, private murals, also lifted from their proper setting) the original impact can only be reconstructed in imagination.
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| Giandomenico Tiepolo Promenade 1791 detached fresco Ca'Rezzonico, Venice |
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| Giandomenico Tiepolo Punchinello and the Tumblers 1791 detached fresco Ca'Rezzonico, Venice |
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| Pierre Paul Prud'hon Portrait of Georges Anthony 1796 oil on canvas Musée des Beaux-Arts, Dijon |
"Citizens, what illusion managed to persuade you that you were inhuman?" Saint-Just exclaimed on 8 Ventôse year II (26 February 1794). "Your revolutionary tribunal has dispatched 300 scoundrels in the last year; did not the Spanish inquisition do more? And for what cause, in the name of God! And did the English courts execute no one this year? And no one mentions the German prisons in which the people are buried."
– Sophie Wahnich, In Defence of the Terror, translated by David Fernbach (Verso, 2012)
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| Jacques-Louis David Portrait of the Marquise d'Orvilliers 1790 oil on canvas Louvre |
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| Henri François Riesener Portrait of Maurice Quay 1797-99 oil on canvas Louvre |
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| Jacques-Louis David Portrait of Pierre Sériziat 1795 oil on canvas Louvre |
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| Jacques-Louis David Portrait of Emilie Sériziat and her son 1795 oil on canvas Louvre |
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| Jan Bernard Duvivier Portrait of the Villers family 1790 oil on canvas Groeninge Museum, Bruges |
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| Henry Fuseli Leonore discovering the dagger left by Alonzo 1790s oil on canvas private collection |
Anne-Françoise-Élisabeth Lange (1772-1825) – pictured below, twice – was famous in the 1790s as Mademoiselle Lange, a so-called Merveilleuse of the Directoire. She was born into a troupe of traveling players, performed on stage from infancy, and conquered Paris in the decade after the Revolution as star of the Comédie-Française. Inevitably, she also served as muse to fashionable painters like Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson (1767-1824). There was evident shock-value in painting a specific woman naked, rather than a formalized nude.
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| Anne-Louis Girodet Mademoiselle Lange as Danaë 1799 canvas Minneapolis Institute of Art |
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| Anne-Louis Girodet Mademoiselle Lange as Venus 1798 oil on canvas Museum der bildenden Künste, Leipzig |