Chapter two focuses on the manner in which the British arts environment changed from the beginning of the eighteenth century, when there existed no picture galleries, no museums, and no places where native artists could exhibit their work, to one which, by the 1770s, sported numerous independently organized artists’ organizations, a royally sanctioned academy, public exhibition facilities visited by tens of thousands of fashionable art enthusiasts, and in which the leading exhibitors of the day were no longer foreigners but native born Englishmen.  By then, the trade in contemporary pictures and prints had developed into an enormous commercial enterprise; artists had become socially accepted within the circles of ‘respectable’ society; and art criticism had entered its nascent stage.  Chapter two specifically discusses the transformation of aesthetic and economic theories and discourse and their steady development towards accommodating an increasingly larger public.