The eighteenth century was a time of contrasts in which opposing values inspired equally divergent art and architecture. Restrained Neoclassicism posed a challenge to the playful delicacy of Rococco, as did the substitution of natural gardens for formal ones. As skepticism, fueled by reason, challenged traditional religious beliefs and practices, so church architects abandoned Baroque exuberance and Rococco fantasy for a plain-spoken, sober idiom, based on reason and Classicism. Likewise, as the champions of reason and "natural" human rights challenged the privileged power structures of the ancient regime, individual self-identity came to be projected in terms of public service, Stoic restraint and naturalness. Because antiquity and nature became authoritative guides for art and life, older notions of inherited privilege and pleasure, and the Baroque and Rococco art forms they spawned, were called into question and refuted.

The perception of nature among the privileged aristocracy was dominated by the desire for an ideal, suffused with nostalgia for an imaginary Arcadia, or evoking a benign modern paradise of playful recreation. On the other hand, the Dutch landscape tradition offered an alternative, more natural vision, and the love of travel, coupled with Enlightenment esteem for accumulated data, inspired urban scenes of seemingly utmost veracity.

Cities as we know them today began to take shape as a number of projects for urban renovation and new development gave shape to varying national identities, in England, France and North America, drawing from the principles of Baroque spatial sensibility and Neoclassical architectural form. The century also witnessed the colonial expansion of European powers, most notably England and France. While England lost its sovereignty in America, it began to assert itself in India, eventually undermining a long and rich cultural and artistic tradition.

By the end of the eighteenth century, the politics, values and social structures of the ancient regime, especially in France, had been undermined by the forces of reason, Enlightenment and the desire for change, resulting in the outbreak of revolution in 1789. Jacques-Louis David's Oath of the Horatii was a call to patriotic self-sacrifice that acquired a timely and tragic significance. While Enlightenment thought had fed the flames of revolution, the devastating and chaotic outcome was evidence to all that humanity was incapable of creating a reasonable society. What had been excluded from the Enlightenment view of humanity--the dark, mysterious forces of human passion--would become a dominant preoccupation for the next generation, the Romantics.