 Hume’s concept of criticism is not interchangeable with either aesthetics or philosophy of art. These now-familiar labels were not available to Hume when he published his Treatise in 1739 and 1740. The Abbé Charles Batteux did not defend the idea of grouping the arts together in an investigation of fine art until 1746. However, Hume knew and drew from the French tradition leading to Batteux’s work. Under this general influence, his essays occasionally refer to the “the finer arts” of painting, music, sculpture, and poetry (CL, 158; SOT 278; OT, 264; C, 289). There is no direct evidence that Hume read Batteux, but they agree in identifying the fine arts as mimetic “arts of luxury” that exist primarily for the sake of our enjoyment (C, 289). Although contemporaries such as Alexander Gerard and Lord Kames (Henry Home) both use the phrase “fine art,” Hume’s books and letters never use that expression. Hume was probably not aware of Alexander Baumgarten’s Reflections on Poetry of 1735, the work that introduced the term “aesthetics.” The thesis that aesthetic judgments are completely distinct from moral judgments would not receive its modern formulation until Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790), after Hume’s death in 1776. So Hume’s reflections on aesthetics occupy a pivotal niche between the appearance of fine art theory and Kant’s defense of an independent aesthetic judgment in the Critique of Judgment – a defense clearly influenced by Kant’s reading of Hume’s essays and An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals.