It’s hard not to like Rococo art. After all, it’s subjects are often about luxury and pleasure, which makes sense since its patrons were the extremely wealthy French aristocracy. This tutorial features two romantic liaisons—Fragonard’s The Swing and The Meeting, portraits and a mythological subject, “Venus Consoling Love.” You get the idea.

Jacques Louis David, an active supporter of the Revolution of 1789, is the star of this tutorial. David served in the revolutionary government, used his art in the service of its cause—and voted to behead King Louis XVI. He captured the patriotism of the revolution’s early phase and later, memorialized its dead heroes. And when the revolution failed, and Napoleon came to power, David used his great talents to present a heroic image of that military general-turned emperor. David invents a new style for the democratic values of the Enlightenment—one that is the very opposite of the luxuriousness of the Rococo—and that looks back to Renaissance and ancient Greek art, hence the name—Neo-Classicism (new classicism).

Britain and America in the Age of Revolutions (Reynolds, Copley, Peale) It was hard to be an artist in America during the colonial period, and for decades after too. There were no real art schools, no grand tradition of art, and no wealthy aristocratic patrons to commission heroic subjects. Americans were practical, and they wanted portraits—and not paintings of classical mythology (which didn’t always make American artists, at least those with wider ambitions, happy). As you’ll learn in this tutorial, Copley was the greatest American portrait painter of the period, and Peale, who studied with Copley, painted portraits of American heroes such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, and founded what became the first real American art museum. American artists looked to England for support and inspiration, often to the older Sir Joshua Reynolds, who was the painter to the King, and first President of the Royal Academy in London.