The century’s end

Abstract

If Dryden could look back on the accomplishments of his century with some doubts, the same was not true of the artists of the end of the eighteenth century. If their accomplishments were not to satisfy the tastes of the nineteenth-century Romantics, those writing in the second half of the eighteenth century were confident that they had changed their world and its art in significant ways. And how could it have been otherwise? In music, Joseph Haydn (1732–1809) and then Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–91) had achieved everything that eighteenth-century art aimed for — feeling controlled by great craft and contained by the spirit of comedy. In painting, there was the excitement of experiment. The connection made between the development of modern non-objective art and cubism and the work of this period are clear enough to anyone studying the purely linear depiction of figures in the illustrations of John Flaxman (1755–1826) in England or the compositions of Jacques David (1748–1825) in France. But form was often at the service of ideology as the American and French Revolutions made the prospect of achieving Utopia on earth a little more believable than it had been to the doubting Jonathan Swift.