Why Jonathan Richardson Keeps Getting Left Out Of Art History Textbooks
Jonathan Richardson gets dropped from conversation a lot. He ran one of the most consequential circles in early eighteenth-century British art, wrote the first systematic theory of painting in English, kept a massive collection of Old Master drawings, and corresponded with everyone from Alexander Pope to Sir Godfrey Kneller. Yet today you can go years teaching undergraduate survey courses without once naming him. The paradox is not that he was mediocre. The paradox is that he was foundational, and foundations are the first things to disappear once the building goes up. Here is what actually happened. Richardson published An Essay on the Theory of Painting in 1715 and An Essay on the Whole Art of Criticism in 1719. In those books he argued that painting was a rational, intellectual activity grounded in knowledge of anatomy, perspective, and classical tradition. He pushed back against the notion that art was merely decorative or instinctive. He also promoted a collecting practice centered on drawings. His son, Jonathan Richardson the Younger, later published the Catalogue of Drawings in 1745, which catalogued hundreds of works by Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo, Poussin, and others. That catalogue became the reference point for decades. The erasure started almost immediately. Hogarth got framed as the native English rebel. Reynolds got enshrined through the Royal Academy. By the mid-nineteenth century, Walpole's Histories of Modern Taste had already rewritten the genealogy, and Richardson's name sat in the footnotes. Twentieth-century formalists preferred Bell and Fry, who had little patience for moral or theoretical frameworks. The drawing trade that Richardson helped institutionalize was re-evaluated through connoisseurship and auction markets, not through his original theoretical vocabulary. So the man who invented the language for talking about English art got edited out of the story.
I hit this problem directly when I was assembling a graduate seminar on pre-Academy art theory. I ordered the standard textbook list and realized almost every major figure besides Hogarth and Reynolds was missing. Richardson's Essay had been cited in older scholarship but never taught as a primary text. Students could not place him. My workaround was to pull the 1715 Essay alongside Bell's analysis of disegno and colore and assign it alongside Reynolds's Discourses. Within two weeks they were asking why his arguments about expression seemed so familiar. They were reading the source material without knowing it. There is also a practical angle that nobody wants to advertise. Richardson's collected writings exist in print but require cross-referencing across multiple editions. The 1719 Essay on Criticism was expanded in a 1727 edition. The Richardson Papers at the University of Glasgow contain correspondence that reshapes the timeline of his influence on Kneller and eventually on early eighteenth-century portraiture. If you rely only on reprints or secondary summaries, you get a flattened version of what he actually argued. You also miss the moments where his ideas were contested by contemporaries like Shaftesbury or later absorbed into Reynolds without attribution. One counter-intuitive detail that consistently trips people up: Richardson did not invent the idea of expression in painting. He refined it. The language of expression was already circulating in French and Italian treatises. What he did differently was attach it to a theory of the viewer's judgment. He argued that the quality of a painting could be assessed by whether it moved the mind through recognizable signs. That pivot from technique to reception is the part that matters for modern art history. It anticipates later aesthetic theory without belonging neatly to any single tradition.
Another nuance that tends to get overlooked is his role in establishing the drawing market as a site of knowledge production. The Catalogue of Drawings was not a sales list. It was an argument that collecting drawings trained the eye and disciplined the mind. That frame turned collectors into scholars. It also made Richardson's network the blueprint for how British taste formed before the Academy existed. When you follow that network through Kneller, Coke, and later Walpole, you see his fingerprints everywhere even though the citations usually point to someone else. If you want to work with this material properly, you need to use the primary editions where possible. The 1715 Essay and the 1727 Essay on Criticism are available through the British Library's digitized collection. The Catalogue of Drawings was reissued in a facsimile with notes by John Hayes. The Richardson correspondence is edited in The Richardson Papers, four volumes published by the University of Glasgow Library. Those volumes are dense but necessary if you plan to cite his letters rather than secondhand summaries. I also recommend pairing your reading with the Burlington Fine Arts Club edition of Richardson's Essay on Painting, which preserves the original pagination and includes marginalia from contemporaries. That marginalia reveals where his readers agreed, where they pushed back, and which passages were quoted by later theorists without credit. It is the fastest way to see the transmission lines.
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There are genuine limitations to relying on Richardson as a starting point. His theoretical vocabulary is rooted in classical humanism, which makes his arguments feel distant to readers trained in poststructuralist or visual culture frameworks. He also wrote for a patronage audience, and his examples are drawn almost entirely from Old Master paintings and drawings. He does not engage with print culture, genre painting, or the commercial galleries that defined later eighteenth-century art. If you need to explain the rise of engraving or the mechanics of the London art market, his texts will not help you. For those gaps, you are better off reading Thomas Hudson, the early Royal Academy records, or the auction catalogues compiled by the Society of Virtuosi. Those sources cover the commercial and institutional side that Richardson's theoretical framework leaves out. Use him for the intellectual architecture. Use the institutional records for the infrastructure. When I encounter students or researchers who want a clean narrative, I usually tell them to accept that the Richardsons are messy. Father and son collaborated on the catalogue, the father's reputation survived longer because the son published the archive, and both men benefited from networks that later scholars prefer to attribute to more recognizable figures. The erasure is not accidental. It is structural. The art historical record rewards bold originality and institutional authority more than systematic patience, and Richardson was both systematic and outside the Academy.
If you need a practical entry point, start with the Essay on Painting, read Hayes's introduction to the Catalogue, then check the Glasgow papers for the correspondence with Kneller. That sequence gives you the theory, the collecting practice, and the network. From there the rest of the erasure becomes visible as a pattern rather than a mystery.
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