Note 1 — William Hogarth: PAINTER, ENGRAVER, AND PHILOSOPHER. Essays on the Man, the Work, and the Time.

Richardson, senior, was a pupil of Charles the Second’s Riley. He was born in 1666, was apprenticed to a scrivener, and at twenty turned painter. In 1734, he edited an edition of Paradise Lost, with notes. He was not a highly educated man, but had given his son a university training; and, once letting fall the unfortunate expression, that “he looked at classical literature through his son,” remorseless Hogarth drew Richardson, junior, impaled with a telescope, the sire peeping through at a copy of Virgil. But Richardson seems to have been an honest, kindly-hearted man; and William Hogarth, as in every case where he had not a downright rogue to deal with, repented of his severity, cancelled the copies of his squib, and destroyed the plate. Richardson was quite a Don in the Art world. He died in 1745, and two years afterwards his collections were sold. The sale lasted eighteen days. The drawings fetched 2,060l.; the pictures, 700l. Richardson’s son, to all appearances, might have served very well as a sample of those monstrous jackasses that the South Sea Bubbler proposed to import from Spain. He declared himself “a connoisseur, and nothing but a connoisseur,” and babbled and scribbled much balderdash in Italianized English. He was not alone. Pope even proposed to found a science of “picture tasting,” and to call it “connoissance.” In our days the science has been christened “fudge.” I have seen the portrait of Richardson the elder, in whose features some one has said that “the good sense of the nation is characterized;” but if this dictum be true, the most sensible-looking man in England must have been a foolish, fat scullion.