Animated Subjects

Abstract

There is a fascinating passage in Jonathan Richardson’s Essay on the Art of Criticism which first lodged in my mind more than thirty years ago and to which my memory returns, just as Richardson intended it should, almost whenever I spend any time looking at eighteenth-century portraits. It is an assessment of a portrait by van Dyck of the Dowager Countess of Exeter in mourning for her husband; it is designed as a lesson in reading and evaluating portraits; and it has taught me more about how portraiture was regarded in the eighteenth century than anything else I have read. I know the picture only from the engraving made by William Faithorne, but Richardson apparently owned the original and could comment on the colours. The Countess, he tells us, dressed in black velvet with white linen at her neck and wrists, is sitting in a chair of crimson velvet, with, to her right, a ‘gold flowered curtain mixt with a little crimson’. 1 In her right hand, she holds a pair of white gloves.