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

• 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