Jonathan Richardson

parable skill. In the field of portraiture, artists such as these are understandably rare, not simply because writing is much more widely learned and practiced than painting, but because the impulses that lie behind biography and portrait painting are often quite different. The painter may create portraits of a highly personal nature-personal in the sense that these paintings represent his own distinctive style, or involve personal associations, or provide a sharply individualized likeness of their subject-but for the most part the artist toils within a firmly established profession, producing images of othersfor others, and often executing them according to contemporary tastes. Biographies may also be made to order, written to satisfy the various requirements of their noble, ecclesiastical, or Grub Street patrons; but most successful biographers have not been biographers-and sometimes not even writers-by profession, and they have usually written their lives either to establish (or redeem) their subject's reputation or to satisfy a private debt (a surprisingly large number of biographies have been published by legal or spiritual heirs). We would therefore expect to find a certain amount of tension between visual and verbal portraits produced by the same artist, and this is precisely what we discover in the work of Jonathan Richardson, the only English painter of the seventeenth or eighteenth century to try his hand at both artistic forms. By characterizing Richardson as a I want to draw attention not only to his career as a painter and writer, but also to that element of subversion that emerges in a comparison of his graphic and literary work. As a double agent, Richardson reveals his divided loyalties as an artist: his conventional practice as a painter of faces is dramatically at odds with his intensely personal and emotionally charged biography of Milton, and with the visual images associated with it. Richardson, I want to argue, was finally unsuccessful in his attempt to create a fully satisfactory artistic

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