Richardson, Jonathon

c.1665

1745

At the age of twenty Jonathan Richardson senior became a pupil of John Riley, the portrait painter, and married his niece. He succeeded Sir Godfrey Kneller and Michael Dahl in the stolid portrait style of the period. He lacked imagination in his work and his portraits all tend to have a similarity about them. Horace Walpole described him as ‘a formal man, with a slow, but loud and sonorous voice, and, in truth, with some affectation in his manner.’ Richardson had some pretensions as an author, and his essays, published in 1715 and 1719, are reputed to have encouraged Hogarth to paint his works on the staircase of St Bartholomew’s Hospital. Richardson was an enthusiastic collector of Old Master Drawings, and his collector’s mark, the letter ‘r’ or an ‘r’ within an artist’s palette, is frequently to be found on drawings. Many of the drawings from his collection later passed into the hands of Sir Joshua Reynolds and Sir Thomas Lawrence.