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| Jean-Baptiste Oudry Still-life with pheasant 1763 oil on canvas Louvre |
"Painting is like music. You've mastered the rules of composition; you know all the chords and their inversions; modulations emerge from beneath your fingers at your pleasure; you know how to link and connect the most disparate chords; you can produce the rarest, the most piquant harmonic effects at will; and that's a great deal. But these terrible or voluptuous songs that, at the very moment they stun or charm my ears, bring love or terror into my heart, dissolve my senses or rattle my insides, do you know how to find those? What's the most beautiful handling without an idea? A painter's virtue. What's a beautiful idea without handling? A poet's virtue. Find the thought first; the style will follow."
– from The Salon of 1767 by Denis Diderot, translated by John Goodman
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| Jean-Baptiste Greuze Portrait of Claude-Henri Watalet 1763 oil on canvas Louvre |
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| Gabriel de Saint-Aubin Salon of 1765 watercolor Louvre |
"Rapid sketches characterize everything with a few strokes. The more ambiguity there is in artistic expression, the more comfortable the imagination. In vocal music one can't help but hear the words it expresses. I make out a good piece of orchestral music to be saying whatever I like, and as I know from experience better than anyone else what touches my heart, it rarely happens that the expression I attribute to the sounds, analogous to my current situation, serious, tender, or gay, is less affecting than another one that's less well suited to me. It's rather like this with sketches and paintings: in a painting I see something that's fully articulated, while in a sketch there are so many things I imagine to be there that in fact are scarcely indicated!"
– from The Salon of 1765 by Denis Diderot, translated by John Goodman
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| Anne Vallayer-Coster Still-life with marine plants, shells, corals 1769 oil on canvas Louvre |
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| Jean-Honoré Fragonard Portrait of a young woman ca. 1770-72 oil on canvas Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
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| Jean-Baptiste Greuze Portrait of Madame du Barry ca. 1771 oil on canvas private collection |
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| Nicolas-Bernard Lépicié Young Draughtsman 1772 oil on canvas Louvre |
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| Nicolas-Bernard Lépicié Courtyard of the Custom House 1775 oil on canvas Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
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| Jean-Michel Moreau Head of an Apostle 1773 oil on canvas Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
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| Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun Portrait of a young musician 1777 oil on canvas private collection |
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| Joseph Duplessis Portrait of Monsieur de Buissy 1780 oil on canvas National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa |
"I hold that the main reason the arts have never, in any century or nation, attained a degree of perfection equal to that achieved in Greece is that this is the only place on earth where they were reduced to proceeding tentatively; that, thanks to the models they left us, we've never been able, like them, to slowly, successfully attain the beauty of these models; that we have made ourselves slavish imitators, to a greater or lesser degree mere portraitists, and that we've never been possessed of more than vague, indistinct borrowings from the ideal model, the true route; that if all these models had been destroyed, there is every reason to believe that, obliged like them to drag ourselves after a misshapen, imperfect, corrupted nature, we would have managed, like them, to arrive at a first, original model, at a true line which would have been our own, as it is not now and never can be."
– from The Salon of 1767 by Denis Diderot, translated by John Goodman
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| Jean François Pierre Peyron Funeral of Miltiades 1782 oil on canvas Louvre |
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| Hubert Robert Interior of the Temple of Diana at Nîmes 1783 oil on canvas Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
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| Hubert Robert Civil Guard ca. 1780-85 oil on panel Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |