The semi-official art encouraged by the foundation of the Academy became more frivolous and light-hearted in the eighteenth century . The court at Versailles lost its attractions, and many patrons now were to be found among the hedonistic bourgeoisie and aristocracy living in Paris. History painting, as opposed to genre scenes or portraiture, retained its position of prestige, but at the same time the various categories began to merge and many artists tried their hands at landscape, genre, history or decorative works, bringing aspects of one type into another. Salons , at which painters exhibited their works, were held with increasing frequency and bred a new phenomenon in the art world - the art critic. The philosopher Diderot was one of the first of these arbiters of taste, doers and undoers of reputations.

Possibly the most complex personality of the eighteenth century was Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684-1721). Primarily a superb draughtsman, Watteau's use of soft and yet rich, light colours reveals how much he was struck by the great seventeenth-century Flemish painter Rubens. The open-air scenes of flirtatious love painted by Rubens and by the fifteenth/sixteenth-century Venetian Giorgione provided Watteau with precedents for his own subtle depictions of dreamy couples (sometimes depictions of characters from the Italian Comedy) strolling in delicate, mythical landscapes. In some of these Fêtes Galantes and in pictures of solitary musicians or actors ( Gilles ), Watteau conveyed a mood of melancholy, loneliness and poignancy that was largely lacking in the works of his many imitators and followers (Nicolas Lancret, J.-B. Pater).

The work of François Boucher (1703-70) was probably more representative of the eighteenth century: the pleasure-seeking court of Louis XV found the lightness of morals and colours in his paintings immensely congenial. Boucher's virtuosity is seen at its best in his paintings of women, always rosy, young and fantasy-erotic.

Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732-1806) continued this exploration of licentious themes but with an exuberance, a richness of colour and a vitality ( The Swing ) that was a feast for the eyes and raised the subject to a glorification of love. Far more restrained were the paintings of Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin (1699-1779), who specialized in homely genre scenes and still lifes, painted with a simplicity that belied his complex use of colours, shapes and space to promote a mood of stillness and tranquillity. Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1725-1805) chose stories that anticipated reaction against the laxity of the times; the moral, at times sentimental, character of his paintings was all-pervasive, reinforced by a stage-like composition well suited to cautionary tales.