British Poetry and Painting 18th-19th c. (ENGL 6060 Spring 2026)

Van Dyck, Charles I of England, a Grand Style portrait

Anthony Van Dyck, Charles I (1600-1649) with M. de St Antoine (oil on canvas, 12.1 ft x 8.8 ft, 1633; Royal Collection, Windsor Castle); Wikimedia.

Van Dyck (1599-1641) was a Flemish artist, whom the Stuart monarch, Charles I, appointed painter to the English court in 1632. Along with another celebrated Flemish artist of the period, Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), Van Dyck typified the Continental artist on whom Charles relied rather than cultivating native English artists. Among the greatest art collectors of his age, Charles instinctively turned to France, Netherlands and Flanders, Spain, and Italy to define the taste of the court.

Van Dyck was especially known for the Grand Style portrait, in this example also an equestrian portrait. The huge canvas depicts Charles in military armor, astride a noble steed and riding through a triumphal arch. The architecture alludes to the triumphal arches of the ancient Roman Empire, which were erected for powerful generals and emperors returning from a great military victory. The symbolism enforces Charles's absolute power; and since he is accompanied only by his riding master, M. de St Antoine, instead of surrounded by cheering crowds, the symbolism also enforces his "Personal Rule" — referring to his decade of ruling without Parliament, an absolutist monarch justified by Divine Right. The picture was originally hung at the end of the Long Gallery in Hampton Court Palace, creating an illusion of the king entering the palace in a blaze of power (Roy Strong, Charles I on Horseback, Viking, 1972, 14, 20-25).

Alexander Pope

In 1711, poet Alexander Pope (1688-1744) published his first major work and

entered London literary circles, including Joseph Addison's. Starting in 1715, he achieved fame and income with his translations of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. He inherited his association with the Sister Arts from his uncle, Samuel Cooper, a painter who earned a reputation as “Van-Dyke in little.” Pope himself ventured into sketching and painting by studying in the studio of the portraitist Charles Jervas around the years 1711-1713, living in Jervas’ London studio and using the Jervas’ address up until 1726. 

This friendship is memorialized in Pope's poem, "Epistle

to Mr. Jervas, dated early 1719. A 1715 portrait of Pope by Jervas

depicts Pope’s preoccupied and distant state of mind when starting his

translation of Homer. In a (date) letter to his lifelong friend, Martha

Blount (1690-1763), who is believed to be the woman in the background of his

portrait, he wrote: “Fame is a thing I am much less covetous of, than your

Friendship; for that I hope will last all my life, the other I cannot

answer for.”

Later, Pope established other kinds of relationships with portrait

painters, appropriate to his growing fame and the political and cultural

controversies to which he responded as a satirical poet. While Pope sat for many portraits, he commissioned Godfrey Kneller (1646-1723), who had taught Jervas, for history paintings in 1719. 

Kneller may not have had epistles written about him as Jervas had, but Pope still expressed his admiration for Kneller through his writing. Pope paid his compliments to Kneller for these paintings he had made by writing in 1719: “To Sir Godfrey Kneller, On his painting for me the Statues of Apollo, Venus, and Hercules' (1719):

What God, what Genius did the Pencil move

When KNELLER painted These?

Twas Friendship—warm as Phoebus, kind as Love,

And strong as Hercules.”

Portraiture has a strong hold through the 1730s, even after Kneller’s passing. At this time, Pope had moved on from translations and turned towards being a satirist. Portraits of Pope in this decade come from Jonathan Richardson Sr. (1667-1745), a painter who had literary aspirations. Richardson’s paintings were one of the distinguished collections Pope would have seen, larger than Jervas’s. Pope’s own collection was seen as not in the taste of a virtuoso—it lacked distinguished paintings done by old masters (da Vinci, Rembrandt, or even Rubens) and history paintings. His only histories were the ones he had commissioned Kneller to create for his staircase in 1719. 

Pope’s years as a satirist produced works such as Moral Essays (four poems published in 1731-35), An Essay on Man (1733-34), and his masterpiece, the four books of The Dunciad (last being published in 1742). The content Pope wrote on was philosophical, ethical, and critical. 

Upon his passing in 1744, it is claimed that friends surrounded him in his villa in Twickenham.

Joseph Addison, "The Spectator," and Coffee House Culture

Thomas Rowlandson (1757-1827), The Coffee House (pencil, pen, and watercolor on paper, 1790; Aberdeen Art Gallery); Art UK.

In 1711, Joseph Addison (1672-1719) and Richard Steele (1671-1729) founded the daily periodical, The Spectator, to bring "Philosophy out of Closets and Libraries, Schools and Colleges, to dwell in Clubs and Assemblies, at Tea-Tables and in Coffee Houses" (Spectator, no. 10). The two writers came together from opposing political perspectives to craft a prose of disinterested, civil observation by its fictional characters "Mr. Spectator" and fellow members of the Spectator Club. Literary historians have treated the periodical's daily installments as a progenitor of the serialized, epistolary novel (Benedict 6-7). 

The social context of The Spectator and other periodicals was the coffee house, which served coffee, chocolate drink, wine, brandy, and punch, and which became hubs for conversation, news, and deal-making among middle-glass gentlemen. The houses tended to host specific professions -- artists at Old Slaughter's, literati at Will's, dancers and opera singers at the Orange, and so on. During the Restoration, Charles II attempted to close them, suspecting "treasonable" conversations since people of all ranks were admitted, but his opposition was stymied by his own cronies who habituated the scene. After the Glorious Revolution, Addison idealized the coffee houses as upholding civility and learning more constantly than was likely. Nonetheless, when James Boswell -- the biographer of the essayist Samuel Johnson -- came to London from his native Scotland, he loved to frequent the coffee houses and imagine himself as "Mr. Spectator" himself (Brewer 35-40).

Benedict, Barbara M. "Joseph Addison." The Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature, edited by David Scott Kastan, Oxford UP, 2006, vol. 1, 6-10.

Brewer, John. The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century, Farrar Straus Giroux, 1997.