Jonathan Richardson Art Theorist of the English Enlightenment
- List Price: $75.00
- Binding: Hardcover
- Publisher: Yale Univ Pr
- Publish date: 10/01/2000
Gibson-Wood describes art consumption in England in Richardson's time as well as the debates concerning native versus Continental painting. She argues that Richardson's personal and written responses to these circumstances quintessentially embody "bourgeois" English Enlightenment ideals and the Lockean principles underpinning them. The first part of the book examines Richardson's personal life, professional career, literary aspirations, activities as a collector, and relationships with such contemporaries as Alexander Pope. In the second part Gibson-Wood sets Richardson's writings in the context of earlier art theory and of other genres of contemporary writing and concludes that his art-theoretical program was a radically English one that upheld the ability of freethinking Englishmen -- including painters -- to establish their own aesthetic criteria.