Harvard Art Museum

The Arts in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World 

Permanently On View 

Between 1700 and 1800, thousands of trading ships crisscrossed the Atlantic Ocean. Carrying raw materials and finished products, free and enslaved people, and word of new discoveries and scientific advances, these ships circulated a range of ideas and images and linked cities and communities across Britain, Europe, and North and South America into a vast, interconnected culture. This gallery brings together paintings, works on paper, and pieces of decorative art to explore the intersection between the arts and this larger web of circulation and exchange.