This essay aims to study eighteenth-century Royal Academicians' and their contemporaries' tastes for imagery of the female nude. In the mid-eighteenth century, when the use of female nude in life class was not a common thing, the Royal Academy introduced models into life class under restricted regulations. The Royal Academy raised question of using a model in life class to open discussion had attracted scholars' research interests. This might also have shown the significant position of itself (as a role model) in discourse of art theory. As a result, the prevailing discourses on use of life model might have helped to legislate the use of female nude in art practice in a moral sense.

Monopolized Taste for Art:
the Royal Academicians' and their Contemporary Intellectuals' Discourses
on imagery of Female Nude In Eighteenth-Century England

Yang, Yong-Yuan
ˇ]Associate Professor, Graduate Institute of Art Education, National Tai-Chung Teachers College, Taiwanˇ^

The Academicians regarded aesthetics of European continental tradition as a canon, and to some extent abused it while introducing it to the public. However, William Hogarth championed the English taste for art to rival against that of the French Academy and the antique sort. Hogarth claimed a necessity for life class, and argued that the 'serpentine' found in a female's body was a source of beauty. Serpentine, in a word, was a 'line of beauty and grace', and was the essence that makes the female body more beautiful then that of the male. The composed variety was also a source of beauty. Although, Hogarth attributed beauty to the serpentine line, it may be argued that it was a projection of his own sexual desire for white female body; the black female was not the object taken into Hogarth's account.

Hogarth published his Analysis of Beauty in 1753. However, it might have been surpassed by the publication of Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) and Sir Joshua Reynolds's Discourses (1-8) (1778). In 1768, the Royal Academy was established, with patronage from King George III, to promote art and patriotism, and to rival against institutes of a similar sort in France. E.[dmund] Burke, S.[amuel] Johnson, and D.[avid] Hume, the contemporaries of Reynolds, who made contributions to aesthetic debates, to some extent, might have outshined Hogarth's treatise.

The Royal Academicians' hobby for antique and classic style of imagery of female nude might have monopolized discourses of female imagery and taste for art as a whole. In this essay, the changing taste for art and its social significance will be discussed.