Abstract

This book challenges the traditional view that Johnson knew and cared little about the fine arts. Brownell goes beyond pejorative anecdotes that exaggerate and misrepresent Johnson's attitudes toward music, painting, architecture, and landscape gardening, and presents evidence that Johnson was thoroughly familiar with the arts of his time, contributing to their patronage as something of a Handelian, friend of painters and architects, and a student of landscape more discerning than William Gilpin. Showing that Johnson's repeated expressions of disgust for the arts were part of a Socratic pretense designed to tease and challenge his contemporaries, the book illustrates that he deliberately chose to play the iconoclast at the very moment when the arts were reviving in England, when taste was becoming de rigeur, and the Royal Academy was being founded.