The Prime Minister of Taste

"In this book, Morris Brownell offers a fresh account of the career and influence of Horace Walpole (1717-1797), the great English man of letters and art historian. Rejecting both the traditional view of Walpole as a trifling collector of curiosities and the more recent assessment of him as a sober social historian and connoisseur, Brownell argues that Walpole grew to become a serious patron, collector, and historian of the arts - the Prime Minister of Taste.". "Drawing on Walpole archival materials and on his forty volumes of letters, Brownell describes the formation of young Walpole's taste and interest in the visual arts. Brownell argues that England's leading portrait engraver, George Virtue, converted Walpole from Grand Tour taste in painting to a life-long study of English portraits. The book discusses the significance of Walpole's collection of English historical portraits and French portraits of the ancien regime, and it analyzes Walpole's fascination with portraiture, comparing the painted portraits Walpole collected and wrote about to the literary portraits he penned in his letters. Walpole's passion for the art of portraiture was not the trifling pastime he pretended, in fact it was the source of his greatest literary achievement - a gallery of literary portraits of the English aristocracy as fine as the painted portraits of Reynolds and Gainsborough."--BOOK JACKET.