RICHARDSON, Jonathan, a celebrated painter of heads, was born about the year 1665, and against his inclination was placed by his father-in-law apprentice to a scrivener, with whom he lived six years. Having obtained his freedom by the death of his master, he followed the bent of his disposition, and at the age of twenty became the disciple of Riley, with whom he lived four years, whose niece he married, and of whose manner he acquired enough to maintain a solid and lasting reputation, even during the lives of Kneller and Dahl, and to remain at the head of the profession when they no longer continued to exercise it.
There is strength, roundness, and boldness in his colouring; but his men want dignity, and his women grace. The good sense of the nation is characterised in his portraits. We perceive that he lived in an age when neither enthusiasm nor servility was predominant. Yet with a pencil so firm, possessed of a numerous and excellent collection of drawings, full of the theory, and profound in reflections on his art, he drew nothing well below the head, and was void of imagination. His attitudes, draperies, and backgrounds, are totally insipid and unmeaning; so ill did he apply to his own practice the sagacious rules and hints which he bestowed on others. Though he wrote with fire and judgment, his paintings owed little to either. No man dived deeper into the inexhaustible stores of Raphael, or was more smitten with the native lustre of Vandyck. Yet though capable of relishing the elevation of the one and the elegance of the other, he could never contrive to see with their eyes when he was to copy nature himself. One wonders that he could comment on their works so well, and imitate them so little.
He quitted business some years before his death; but his temperance and virtue contributed to protract his life to a great length in the full enjoyment of his understanding, and in the felicity of domestic friendship. He had a paralytic stroke that affected his arm, yet never disabled him from his customary walks and exercise. He had been in St James's Park, and died suddenly at his house in Queen's-square on his return home, on the 28th of May 1745, when he had passed the eightieth year of his age. He left a son and four daughters; one of whom was married to his disciple Mr Hudson, and another to Mr Grigson, an attorney. The taste and learning of the son, and the harmony in which he lived with his father, are visible in the joint works which they composed. In 1719 the father published two discourses: 1. An Essay on the whole Art of Criticism as it relates to Painting; 2. An Argument in behalf of the Science of a Connoisseur. In 1722 came forth
"An Account of some of the Statues, Bas-reliefs, Drawings, and Pictures, in Italy, &c. with Remarks by Mr Richardson, senior and junior." The son made the journey; and from his notes, letters, and observations, they both at his return compiled this valuable work. As the father was a formal man, with a slow but loud and sonorous voice, and, in truth, with some affectation in his manner, and as there is much singularity in his style and expression, these peculiarities, for they were scarcely foibles, struck superficial readers, and between the laughers and the envious the book was much ridiculed. Yet both this and the former are full of matter, good sense, and instruction; and the very quaintness of some expressions, and their laboured novelty, shew the difficulty which the author experienced in his attempts to convey mere visible ideas through the medium of language. If these authors were censured when they confined themselves within their own circle, it was not to be expected that they would be treated with milder indulgence when they ventured into a sister region. In 1734, they published a very thick octavo, containing explanatory notes and remarks on Milton's Paradise Lost, with the life of the author, and a discourse on the poem. Again were the good sense, the judicious criticisms, and the sentiments that broke forth in this work, forgotten in the singularities by which it is distinguished. The father having said, in apology for being little conversant in ancient literature, that he had looked into the classics through his son, Hogarth, whom a quibble could furnish with wit, drew the father peeping through the nether end of a telescope, with which his son was perforated, at a Virgil placed on a high shelf. Richardson, indeed, was as incapable of reaching the sublime or harmonious in poetry, as he was in painting, though so capable of illustrating both. Some specimens of verse that he has given us here and there in his works excite no curiosity for more, though he informs us in his Milton, that if painting was his wife, poetry had been his secret concubine.