DOI article:
Mount, Harry: Shaftesbury V. Richardson: A Counterfactual Exercise
DOI Page / Citation link:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.56525#0017
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HARRY MOUNT
was Shaftesbury’s good fortune that the book’s publication coincided exactly with the beginning of the long
political ascendancy of the Whigs. Just as the Whigs took up and promoted the Palladian style in architecture,
so Whig patrons like the Earl of Burlington seized on Second Characters as a blueprint for an artistic style
which would reflect their own political values. And Shaftesbury was, as everyone knew, himself a one-time
Whig politician and the grandson of the 1st Earl of Shaftesbury, the virtual founder of the party. The Whigs
were helped in this enterprise by the clarity with which Shaftesbury advanced his theories and his plentiful
examples of both good and bad paintings. Using their wealth and political power, the Whigs began by fo-
cusing their patronage mainly on history painters from abroad, a move made necessary by the lack of home-
-grown history painters. However, seeing the massive patronage that attached itself to the one native history
painter of any quality, James Thornhill, other British artists, amongst them William Hogarth, were inspired to
take up history painting. The transformation of the first St Martin Lane’s Academy into a new Royal Academy
in 1730 reflected and cemented this development. The style promoted and taught by this new Academy was
precisely the severe, moral style advocated by Shaftesbury. Subsequent British writers on art argued for simi-
lar values, thus giving rise to a distinctive British school of art theory which has recently come to be known
as civic humanist theory. Prominent among these authors were connoisseurs from upper class backgrounds,
who continued to dominate the discussion of art. Both connoisseurs and painters especially admired the un-
equivocally anti-French stance adopted by Shaftesbury, and the severe style of history painting he advocated
acquired powerful patriotic overtones. By the time Reynolds came to deliver his discourses at the Academy
he had little to do but to re-present the arguments already made by Shaftesbury - the battle for a British school
of history painting had already been won.
That is one story. In a second story, Shaftesbury’s Second Characters appeared at much the same time
as Richardson’s Theory of Painting and both books received a polite level of interest. Shaftesbury’s book
was praised for its elegant style and the clarity of its arguments and it was immediately judged to be su-
perior to Richardson’s on both counts. Some of the words it introduced into the language - rhyparography,
hyperbole, ellipsis - became for a time quite fashionable among the virtuosi. Several young painters, reading
Second Characters, were inspired to paint in the severe moral style advocated by the book. The life stories of
these young painters does not, however, make pleasant reading. The patronage which they imagined would
stem from Shaftesbury’s ideas did not appear, and poverty and disillusionment resulted. British painters who
wanted to make a living continued to paint portraits, while upper class art lovers who had been inspired by
Second Characters responded by buying Italian paintings from abroad rather than patronising native painters.
Those same upper class art lovers also continued to buy Dutch paintings and even French rococo works, and
they reacted to the discrepancies between these tastes and the doctrines advanced by Shaftesbury and other
theorists by retreating behind a polite wall of silence. The discussion of painting was, for good or ill, left to
the painters, who began to realise that the pragmatic, compromising theory offered by Richardson offered
a more workable model than the idealistic and outspoken version offered by Shaftesbury. And so it was that
when Joshua Reynolds comes to deliver his discourses to the new Royal Academy in 1769 he followed in
Richardson’s footsteps in attempting to deliver a compromise between continental art theory and British taste
and modes of thought. In particular, Reynolds, like Richardson, based his theory on the Lockean empiricism
which had become so integral to British ways of thinking and which Shaftesbury had so violently shunned.107
In the wake of Reynolds’s domination of British art theory Shaftesbury’s Second Characters came to be seen
as an eccentric curiosity, a work more similar in its significance to Hogarth’s Analysis of Beauty than to the
mainstream works of Richardson or Reynolds. Shaftesbury’s Second Characters had turned out to be one of
those books of art theory which, as Denis Mahon once put it, help the polite to speak more elegantly about art
without actually affecting their behaviour.108
Which version do you believe? I’m afraid my money would be on the latter. I suspect that even if Shaftes-
bury had completed his book the history of classical art theory in Britain would still have been a long, drawn-
-out failure. But even if the effects of Shaftesbury’s Second Characters on the future of British art is ulti-
mately unknowable, the one thing we can say with certainty is that the book, if finished, would have greatly
enriched the literature of art written in English.
107 As, in real life, Reynolds indeed did; see A. Asfour, P. Williamson, On Reynolds ’s Use of De Piles, Locke, and Hume in his
Essays on Rubens and Gainsborough, “Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes”, vol. 60, 1997, pp. 222-225; Mount, Leonardo’s
‘Treatise ’..., pp. 216-217.
108 D. Mahon, Studies in Seicento Art and Theory, London 1947, pp. 5-6.
HARRY MOUNT
was Shaftesbury’s good fortune that the book’s publication coincided exactly with the beginning of the long
political ascendancy of the Whigs. Just as the Whigs took up and promoted the Palladian style in architecture,
so Whig patrons like the Earl of Burlington seized on Second Characters as a blueprint for an artistic style
which would reflect their own political values. And Shaftesbury was, as everyone knew, himself a one-time
Whig politician and the grandson of the 1st Earl of Shaftesbury, the virtual founder of the party. The Whigs
were helped in this enterprise by the clarity with which Shaftesbury advanced his theories and his plentiful
examples of both good and bad paintings. Using their wealth and political power, the Whigs began by fo-
cusing their patronage mainly on history painters from abroad, a move made necessary by the lack of home-
-grown history painters. However, seeing the massive patronage that attached itself to the one native history
painter of any quality, James Thornhill, other British artists, amongst them William Hogarth, were inspired to
take up history painting. The transformation of the first St Martin Lane’s Academy into a new Royal Academy
in 1730 reflected and cemented this development. The style promoted and taught by this new Academy was
precisely the severe, moral style advocated by Shaftesbury. Subsequent British writers on art argued for simi-
lar values, thus giving rise to a distinctive British school of art theory which has recently come to be known
as civic humanist theory. Prominent among these authors were connoisseurs from upper class backgrounds,
who continued to dominate the discussion of art. Both connoisseurs and painters especially admired the un-
equivocally anti-French stance adopted by Shaftesbury, and the severe style of history painting he advocated
acquired powerful patriotic overtones. By the time Reynolds came to deliver his discourses at the Academy
he had little to do but to re-present the arguments already made by Shaftesbury - the battle for a British school
of history painting had already been won.
That is one story. In a second story, Shaftesbury’s Second Characters appeared at much the same time
as Richardson’s Theory of Painting and both books received a polite level of interest. Shaftesbury’s book
was praised for its elegant style and the clarity of its arguments and it was immediately judged to be su-
perior to Richardson’s on both counts. Some of the words it introduced into the language - rhyparography,
hyperbole, ellipsis - became for a time quite fashionable among the virtuosi. Several young painters, reading
Second Characters, were inspired to paint in the severe moral style advocated by the book. The life stories of
these young painters does not, however, make pleasant reading. The patronage which they imagined would
stem from Shaftesbury’s ideas did not appear, and poverty and disillusionment resulted. British painters who
wanted to make a living continued to paint portraits, while upper class art lovers who had been inspired by
Second Characters responded by buying Italian paintings from abroad rather than patronising native painters.
Those same upper class art lovers also continued to buy Dutch paintings and even French rococo works, and
they reacted to the discrepancies between these tastes and the doctrines advanced by Shaftesbury and other
theorists by retreating behind a polite wall of silence. The discussion of painting was, for good or ill, left to
the painters, who began to realise that the pragmatic, compromising theory offered by Richardson offered
a more workable model than the idealistic and outspoken version offered by Shaftesbury. And so it was that
when Joshua Reynolds comes to deliver his discourses to the new Royal Academy in 1769 he followed in
Richardson’s footsteps in attempting to deliver a compromise between continental art theory and British taste
and modes of thought. In particular, Reynolds, like Richardson, based his theory on the Lockean empiricism
which had become so integral to British ways of thinking and which Shaftesbury had so violently shunned.107
In the wake of Reynolds’s domination of British art theory Shaftesbury’s Second Characters came to be seen
as an eccentric curiosity, a work more similar in its significance to Hogarth’s Analysis of Beauty than to the
mainstream works of Richardson or Reynolds. Shaftesbury’s Second Characters had turned out to be one of
those books of art theory which, as Denis Mahon once put it, help the polite to speak more elegantly about art
without actually affecting their behaviour.108
Which version do you believe? I’m afraid my money would be on the latter. I suspect that even if Shaftes-
bury had completed his book the history of classical art theory in Britain would still have been a long, drawn-
-out failure. But even if the effects of Shaftesbury’s Second Characters on the future of British art is ulti-
mately unknowable, the one thing we can say with certainty is that the book, if finished, would have greatly
enriched the literature of art written in English.
107 As, in real life, Reynolds indeed did; see A. Asfour, P. Williamson, On Reynolds ’s Use of De Piles, Locke, and Hume in his
Essays on Rubens and Gainsborough, “Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes”, vol. 60, 1997, pp. 222-225; Mount, Leonardo’s
‘Treatise ’..., pp. 216-217.
108 D. Mahon, Studies in Seicento Art and Theory, London 1947, pp. 5-6.