Priapus Knight

Marilyn Butler

  • The Arrogant Connoisseur: Richard Payne Knight 1751-1824 edited by Michael Clarke and Nicholas Penny
    Manchester, 189 pp, £30.00, February 1982, ISBN 0 7190 0871 9

Richard Payne Knight was an important English intellectual of the era of the French Revolution. He flourished from the 1770s until his death, perhaps by suicide, in 1824. Most of that time he wielded great influence in the art world, as a leading collector, connoisseur and aesthetician, but as the theorist of potent subjects like myth and symbol he mattered almost as much to the poets. So what is oddest about this capable, lively man is that, as far as literary scholarship at least is concerned, he has almost disappeared from sight. Amends are being made by the current exhibition at the Whitworth Gallery in Manchester, and by the collection of specialist studies which doubles as a catalogue.

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