Shaftesbury v. Richardson: a Counterfactual Exercise

This article considers what might have happened had the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury lived long enough to see his planned book of art theory, Second Characters, into publication. It suggests that Second Characters would have challenged, and perhaps supplanted, Jonathan Richardson the Elder’s Theory of Painting (1715) as the first substantial and original British contribution to the theory of art. Much of the article consists of a comparison between Richardson’s Theory of Painting and the ‘Plasticks’ section of Second Characters, for which Shaftsbury’s notes survive. This comparison suggests that the theory of painting which Shaftesbury would have offered to his compatriots would have differed from that offered by Richardson in certain important respects. Primarily addressing his text to his fellow aristocratic patrons rather than to painters, Shaftesbury’s vision for the future of British art was both more high-minded and more narrow than that offered by Richardson. For Shaftesbury the moral subject matter of painting was all-important, and the artistic traits he most admired, including historical subjects, grandeur of scale and austerity of style, were those he saw as best placed to transmit that moral subject matter. Richardson, by contrast, was for more tolerant of the extant British taste for portraits and more sensual styles and offered a theory of art which was in part formalist. The article also stresses the importance of the equation Shaftesbury made between the social and political health of a society and the quality of its art, and suggests that had Second Characters been published at the time when it was written we might now consider Shaftesbury, rather than Winckelmann, as the father of the social history of art. The article ends by considering two possible outcomes had Second Characters been published in the early eighteenth century, in one of which it had a profound impact on British art and British attitudes to art, and in the other of which Shaftesbury’s refusal to compromise with current British tastes condemned his text to no more than a marginal status.