Requiem
1791
An anonymous stranger commissioned it and Mozart died before finishing. A pupil completed the rest, and arguments about which bars are his continue.
★ 9.5
Browse by time · decade
1790s
1790 – 1799
Showing 175 works across all media from the 1790s
The Death of Marat
1793 · Musees Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels
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.
★ 9.0
Otani Oniji III as Yakko Edobei
1794 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
Sharaku made about 140 actor prints in ten months and then vanished so completely that people still argue about who he was.
★ 7.9
Psyche Revived by Cupid's Kiss
1793 · Louvre, Paris
Cupid's wings stay up as the two bodies cross in a weightless X, cut so smooth the marble stops reading as stone.
★ 7.9
Three Beauties of the Present Day
1793 · Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), Boston
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.
★ 7.8
Critique of Judgment
1790 · 448 pages
Beauty sits in no object, yet you expect everyone to agree with you. Kant grounds that strange demand, and shows why a raging ocean enlarges the person watching it rather than crushing him.
★ 7.5
The Life of Samuel Johnson
1791 · 1408 pages
Boswell met Samuel Johnson, who had written the English dictionary, in 1763 and wrote down his talk for twenty years. Johnson steps off the page as somebody you have actually met.
★ 7.3
London Symphonies
1795
Haydn was nearly sixty and had spent thirty years in a prince's service before a promoter took him to London, where he became famous overnight.
★ 7.3
The Ancient of Days
1794 · Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, England
Blake's Urizen leans out of the sun with a golden compass to measure the void, and Blake was not sure whether to admire him.
★ 7.2
No man chooses evil, because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks.
A Vindication of the Rights of Men · 1790
Jacques the Fatalist
1796 · 261 pages
Jacques and his master ride along while Jacques tries to tell his love story. Everyone interrupts, the narrator taunts you, and the interruptions become Diderot's case against free will.
★ 7.1
The Intervention of the Sabine Women
1799 · Louvre, Paris
Hersilia throws herself between the two armies with her arms out. David painted it after the Terror, arguing for reconciliation instead of oaths.
★ 7.1
Reflections on the Revolution in France
1790 · 400 pages
Modern conservatism begins here, in Burke's fury at revolutionaries who tore down old institutions for the sake of an abstraction. Society is a partnership between the dead, the living, and the unborn.
★ 7.1
A state without some means of change is without the means of its own conservation.
Reflections on the Revolution in France · 1790
Make the Revolution a parent of settlement, and not a nursery of future revolutions.
Reflections on the Revolution in France · 1790
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
1798 · 76 pages
Stopped outside a wedding, a guest must hear an old sailor out: he shot an albatross for no reason, and the ship fell becalmed with water everywhere and none to drink.
★ 6.8
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
1790 · 441 pages
Seventeen and running from his apprenticeship, Franklin walks into Philadelphia carrying three bread rolls. He later ruled a daily chart of thirteen virtues, and every American self-improvement book works from that design.
★ 6.7
On the Aesthetic Education of Man
1794 · 224 pages
Watching the French Revolution collapse into terror, Schiller concluded that reason cannot free people whose feelings stay uneducated. Beauty does it, through play, and Romanticism built its case for art on that claim.
★ 6.2
An Essay on the Principle of Population
1798 · 172 pages
Population multiplies faster than food supply, Malthus argued, so misery and restraint are permanent conditions of human life, not problems reform can fix. Darwin read him and found natural selection.
★ 6.2
Histoire de Ma Vie · 1791
The guests are met, the feast is set: May'st hear the merry din?
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner · 1798
Rights of Man · 1792
Old religious factions are volcanoes burnt out.
Speech on the Petition of the Unitarians, May 11, 1792 · 1792
The Age of Reason · 1794
The Age of Reason · 1794