The year 1790 was the start of a major chapter in the history of aesthetics. That was the year, of course, of the publication of Immanuel Kant’s long-awaited “critique of taste,” in the form of the “Critique of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment,” the first half of his third Critique, the Critique of the Power of Judgment. This epochal work attempted to resolve many of the debates central to the first century of modern aesthetics, which can be regarded as having commenced with such works as the Earl of Shaftesbury’s Characteristics of 1711, Joseph Addison’s Spectator essays on “The Pleasures of the Imagination” of 1712, and Francis Hutcheson’s Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue of 1725, all in Britain; the Abbé Du Bos’s 1719 Critical Reflections on Poetry, Painting and Music in France; and the German Alexander Baumgarten’s 1735 Meditations on Poetry, which gave the nascent discipline its name. Kant’s work in turn set the agenda for much of the philosophical and critical work in aesthetics throughout Europe for following decades, certainly through the publication of Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation and the first of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s lecture courses on the fine arts, both in 1818, but in a number of forms well beyond this date too. But Kant’s Critique was not the only significant work in aesthetics published in 1790. In Germany, Kant’s former student Marcus Herz published a second edition of his own Essay on Taste, originally published in 1776, and Karl Heinrich Heydenreich, an enthusiastic follower of Kant in other areas, published a massive System of Aesthetics, which insisted on a place for the emotions in aesthetic experience in a way quite foreign to Kant. In Britain, a much better-known work, Archibald Alison’s Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste, also made the case for the centrality of emotions in the aesthetic experience of both nature and art, an emphasis that would still reverberate in essays by John Stuart Mill almost half a century later and that would provide the ultimate target for the alternative notion of “aesthetic distance” promulgated in the early twentieth century. The year 1790 thus marks a significant boundary between one chapter in the history of aesthetics and the next.