Note 34 — A BOOK FOR A RAINY DAY

There is a confusion here. Walpole in his Anecdotes of Painting deals only with Jonathan Richardson the elder (1665-1745), portrait painter and critic; Smith refers to his son (1694-1771). The two were greatly attached to each other. There was a story that they sketched each other’s faces every day. Old Richardson, who wrote a treatise on Paradise Lost, was able to study the classics only through his son, on whom he doted. Hogarth made a caricature, which he suppressed, of the father using his son as a telescope to read the writers of Greece and Rome. W. H. Pyne says of Old Richardson in Wine and Walnuts: “He seldom rambled city-ways, though sometimes he stepped in at the ‘Rainbow,’ where he counted a few worthies, or looked in at Dick’s and gave them a note or two. He would not put his foot on the threshold of the ‘Devil,’ however, for he thought the sign profane. Fielding would run a furlong to escape him; he called him Doctor Fidget.”