18th century
Showing 963 works across all media from the 18th century
Goldberg Variations
The pianist Glenn Gould plays it fast and dry and hums audibly throughout, which the engineers could never get him to stop doing.
St Matthew Passion
Two choirs and two orchestras face each other across the church and answer one another, while a boys' choir cuts through both from above.
Requiem
An anonymous stranger commissioned it and Mozart died before finishing. A pupil completed the rest, and arguments about which bars are his continue.
Mass in B minor
Bach assembled it late in life partly from music he had written decades earlier, and never heard the whole thing performed in his lifetime.
Don Giovanni
Mozart is said to have written the overture the night before the Prague premiere, and the orchestra sight-read it at the first performance.
Messiah
Handel wrote it for a Dublin charity concert, and the hall asked women to come without hoops in their skirts so more people could fit.
The Death of Marat
David was Marat's friend and political ally, and he laid the murdered man out in his bath with the gravity of a religious lamentation.
Red and White Plum Blossoms
A stylized river runs down the gold between two plum trees, one young and white, the other old and red, leaning toward each other.
Hope springs eternal in the human breast; Man never is, but always to be blessed.
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Gibbon follows Rome from its imperial peak to the fall of Constantinople thirteen centuries later, in the finest prose English history possesses. His contempt for Christianity still makes readers laugh.
Critique of Pure Reason
Western thought divides at this book. Kant argues that space, time, and cause belong to the mind doing the looking rather than to the world, and marks the boundary reason cannot cross.
The Oath of the Horatii
Three brothers salute the swords their father holds up while the women of the house collapse at the right, four years before the Revolution.
The Four Seasons
Vivaldi spent most of his career teaching at a Venice orphanage for girls, whose orchestra became famous enough that travelers came to hear it.
The Embarkation for Cythera
Couples linger on the shore of Venus's island at dusk, unwilling to board. Watteau gave it to the Academy, which invented a genre to fit it.
The Wealth of Nations
Wealth is not gold in a vault but what a country produces, and specialization multiplies it. Smith begins with ten men making pins and every economic argument since descends from him.
The Story of the Stone, or The Dream of the Red Chamber, Vol. 1
Bao-yu, born with a jade in his mouth, would rather write poems with his cousins than study for the exams, while his great eighteenth-century Chinese family slides toward ruin. Their world is ending.
Gulliver's Travels
Swift's ship's surgeon washes up among people six inches tall, then among giants, then among rational horses who find humans repulsive. Each voyage is funnier than the last and angrier about us.
Candide
Voltaire sends an innocent young man taught that this is the best of all possible worlds through war, earthquake, and the Inquisition. The comedy is savage and the optimism does not survive.
Songs of Innocence and of Experience
Short poems in simple meter about lambs, chimney sweeps, and a tiger burning in the forests of the night. Blake sets an innocent version beside a bitter one and lets you decide.
Otani Oniji III as Yakko Edobei
Sharaku made about 140 actor prints in ten months and then vanished so completely that people still argue about who he was.
Psyche Revived by Cupid's Kiss
Cupid's wings stay up as the two bodies cross in a weightless X, cut so smooth the marble stops reading as stone.
Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.
The Nightmare
An incubus squats on a sleeping woman's chest while a wild-eyed horse pushes through the curtains. It made Fuseli famous immediately.
Three Beauties of the Present Day
Three famous women of 1790s Edo on mica ground, their faces nearly identical, so you have to read them from the tilt of an eye.
The Nude Maja
Not a goddess but a real woman looking straight back, which is why the Inquisition took an interest. Goya painted a clothed version too.
Pierrot, Formerly Known as Gilles
A clown in white satin stands alone at full length with his arms hanging useless, given the scale of a grand portrait.