ABSTRACT
One of the ways of bringing some of the changes into sharper contextual focus is to step back and examine landscape painting and other forms of spatial expression found during the last decade or so of the ancien regime. The proportion of landscapes, portraits and the minor genres on show also increases but again – with a few notable exceptions – it is hard to identify much of a change in the appearance of the landscapes exhibited either side of the French Revolution, perhaps only their quality. The chapter deals with Claude-Henri Watelet, author of the Dictionnaire des beaux-arts, a theorist and a practitioner of landscape, and an exceptionally well-connected amateur. Watelet described the pastoral vision and the social and economic conditions necessary to sustain it in some detail in a short but influential treatise on the history and principles of gardening, his Essai sur les jardins.
