Valentine Green's a Review of the Polite Arts (1782): War for Empire And the Campaigns to Promote Protestant Devotional Art

Abstract

This essay emerges from an investigation into the degree to which one can interpret the works of eighteenth-century reproductive engravers as indicative of their own religious, political and moral values. It is the first account of the print business to claim that the personal values of such men mattered deeply to what they made and sold. Valentine Green, the mezzotint entrepreneur, was selected as a prime example largely because he left a substantial oeuvre of literary works and was also an early politician of the arts. He was deeply involved in the formulation of the policy, with regard to devotional images, which emerged from a succession of competing art institutions. Green's writings and his institutional activities allow us to know in detail his politics and churchmanship. The case here is that he was a High Church Tory who combined a strong sense of the importance of monarchical authority with an understanding that the prime role of the arts was to make a devout and politically obedient national community. In this essay, I claim that it was not just one person who thought this way. I claim, rather, that Green championed a hitherto unnoticed Tory aesthetic theory. This theory had at its core the necessity of breaking down prejudices against making devotional images that lurked in other quarters of Protestantism.