1766 in art
Events from the year 1766 in art.
Events
- 21 April – The Exhibition of 1766 opens at Spring Gardens in London
- 19 July – A baronetcy is created for British sculptor Henry Cheere.
- England's oldest surviving Georgian theatre is constructed in Stockton-on-Tees.
- The Drottningholm Palace Theatre is reopened as an opera house in Stockholm, Sweden, in its surviving form, designed by Carl Fredrik Adelcrantz.
- Denis Diderot's Essais sur la peinture is published.
Works
Image:'Crows' by Maruyama Okyo.jpg|thumb|right|Maruyama Ōkyo, Crows, 1766; pair of sixfold screens; ink and gold on paper.- Pompeo Batoni – Portrait of William Gordon
- Nathaniel Dance-Holland – The Meeting of Dido and Aeneas
- Thomas Gainsborough – Portrait of David Garrick with a bust of Shakespeare
- Jean-Antoine Houdon – Bruno of Cologne
- Hubert Robert – A View of Ripetta
- Maruyama Ōkyo – Crows
- Allan Ramsay – Portrait of David Hume
- Joshua Reynolds – Portrait of John Burgoyne
- Claude-Joseph Vernet – Coast Scene with a British Man of War
- Benjamin West – Pylades and Orestes Brought as Victims before Iphigenia
- Joseph Wright of Derby – ''A Philosopher Lecturing on the Orrery''
Births
- March 1 – Johann Conrad Felsing, German topographer and engraver using stippling
- March 2 – Thomas Henry, French painter and art patron
- March 16 – Jean-Frédéric Waldeck, artist and explorer
- April 1 – François-Xavier Fabre, French painter of historical subjects
- April 6 – Wilhelm von Kobell, German painter, printmaker and teacher
- September 16 – Jes Bundsen, Danish architectural and landscape painter and etcher
- October 14 – Friedrich Carl Gröger, north-German portrait painter and lithographer
- December 22 – Johann Samuel Arnhold, German painter in oil and water-colours, and on porcelain and enamel
- December 25 – Samuel Drummond, British painter especially portraits and marine genre works date unknown
- * Pierre-Charles Bridan, French sculptor
- * Mariano Gerada, sculptor and woodworker
Deaths
- January 7 – Giacomo Boni, Italian painter
- January 19 – Giovanni Niccolò Servandoni, French architect and painter
- March 4 – Joseph Aved, also called le Camelot and Avet le Batave, French Rococo portraitist
- April 18 – Corrado Giaquinto, Italian Rococo painter
- May 5 – Olof Arenius, Swedish portrait painter
- June 22 – Carlo Zimech, Maltese priest and painter
- July 17 – Giuseppe Castiglione, Italian Jesuit Brother, missionary in China, painter at the court of the Emperor
- July 18 – Mauro Antonio Tesi, Italian painter of the late-Baroque period, active mainly in Bologna
- August 13 – Margaret Fownes-Luttrell, English heiress and painter
- November 7
- *Vincenzo Meucci, Italian painter whose patrons included Anna Maria Luisa de' Medici
- *Jean-Marc Nattier, French painter date unknown
- * Antonio Consetti, Italian historical painter
- * William Elliott, English engraver