Cultivating Cultivation
John Mullan: English culture, 18 June 1998
The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the 18th Century
by John Brewer.
HarperCollins, 448 pp., £19.99, January 1997,0 00 255537 9 Show More
by John Brewer.
HarperCollins, 448 pp., £19.99, January 1997,
“... trade. Engravings shaped public taste, and the printsellers determined what was worth engraving. Edmund Burke referred to John Boydell, London’s most powerful printseller, as ‘an English Tradesman who patronises the art better than the grand Monarque of France’. He, as much as Reynolds, was an arbiter of the nation’s tastes. At a Royal Academy ... ”