Knight's Tale
Kenneth Garlick
The reputation of Richard Payne Knight has always suffered from the fact that his errors of judgment were of greater publicity value than his achievements. Anti- quarian and collector, the inspired builder of Downton Castle, an esteemed and almost venerated member of the Society of Antiquaries and of the Dilettanti, a Trustee of the British Museum, he was the only con- noisseur who consistently, and sometimes vehemently, denigrated the Elgin Marbles and opposed the purchase of them for the nation. He was disputatious by nature and overbearing in manner. His features were pugnacious and slightly comic. In Lawrence's portrait of 1794 he is pop-eyed and aggressive. In Bacon's bust of 1814 he looks deeply suspicious. To his contem- poraries he was a larger-than-life character. The Lawrence portrait, which hung at Downton until comparatively recently, was accepted by the Treasury in lieu of duties in 1970 and allocated to the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester. It was therefore ap- propriate that the Whitworth should organise a Payne Knight exhibition earlier this year. This book is both a catalogue of the exhibition and, in the essays which form the greater part of it, an appraisal of Knight and his life-work. No such appraisal has been attempted before although valuable assessments pf his varied activities have ap- peared separately over the years, notably Christopher Hussey's in The Picturesque as long ago as 1927.
It should be said first of all that the ex- hibition was brought together with thoroughness and imagination and that The Arrogant Connoisseur, as a catalogue and as a series of exploratory essays, could scarcely be bettered. How does Knight come out of it? He does not emerge as a loVable character. How could he? The word `lovable' was probably not in his vocabulary. He does, however, emerge as truly sympathetic, a serious, dedicated scholar, a hard-working enthusiast, a man of taste who did not allow himself to be guided too much by others, an independent character who did not deny his ironmaster's background in any attempt to break into the great or fashionable world. He did not of course have to. His £6,000 a year gave him almost any entree he required. Never- theless he was not deflected from the pur- poses his nature dictated to him. He was always true to himself. He would have en- joyed the academic world, but what a good thing that he never.entered it! Such a move would probably have destroyed him, en- couraging his combative spirit to fritter time away in small disputes about small matters. Some of his work, for instance his speculation on the principles of taste (An Analytical Enquiry) and the consequent theorising over what to do, or not to do, with natural landscape, is now so dated that one's interest flags. So too his wordy parry- ing with Uvedale Price. But Downton re- mains, even though the family no longer own it and its contents have largely been dispersed. It is a splendid, imaginative crea- tion, a contradictory mixture, like all Knight's undertakings, of an exercise of the intellect and the turbulence of the spirit, a great brooding pile above the busy waters of the Teme, a calm and castellated refuge looking down on rustic, wooden bridges and a mock Roman bath.
The concept of Downton certainly owes something to Claude and perhaps to one particular example of his work, La Crescen- za, which Knight once owned. As a collec- tor of paintings he was sensitive to the kind of picture which is intended for quiet meditation and the fact that his 'Vermeer' (not Knight's attribution) is now called Sweerts and that the best-known of his Rembrandts (The Cradle) has been demoted from autograph to studio, is unimportant. Both are pictures of high quality and poetic content. Knight's real
passion as a collector was however concen- trated on smaller and more ancient things than 17th-century European paintings, on coins, gems, small bronzes, and fragments of sculpture, all of which, some thousands of items, he bequeathed to the British Museum. The selection shown at Man- chester was choice. A suggestion that it was his taste for the small, the highly finished and the perfect, which led him to under- value the Elgin Marbles is treated by the authors of this book with some reserve but they do not enlarge upon it, and to this ex- tent their evaluation of Knight as a con- noisseur is limited.
It may seem that Knight was given to act- ing a part. His first publication, An Ac- count of the Worship of Priapus lately ex- isting at Isernia, in the Kingdom of Naples . .. with its beautifully executed mild-porn engravings, can be regarded as exhibi- tionist. The expedition which he made to Sicily in his , twenties, taking his own draughtsmen with him, can be read as a showing-off gesture on the part of a man of plebeian, if prosperous, roots. But such judgments are wrong. One of the virtues of this book is that it reveals Knight as so much more than an actor. He was, as the authors point out, an insatiable reader of classical literature. His diary of the Sicilian expedition which has just been 'found' in the Goethe-Schiller-Archiv at Weimar, was partly translated and indeed published by Goethe himself. Knight was serious, was taken seriously in his own time and should be taken seriously today.
How enviable on £6,000 a year (not at all a vast income even in Knight's day) to be able to run a house in Whitehall and an estate in Shropshire, to collect and publish at will, to be of service to the world of scholarship and to move in the intellectual and social circles of one's choice. It shows clarity of mind and purpose to have done it. He had no wife of course. The seven essays in The Arrogant Connoisseur, together with the catalogue and the illustrations, form a proper tribute to this most unusual man. There is a full bibliography. Let us hope that the book will alert a larger public not only to the importance of Knight in his own day but also to the survival of Downton Castle in our own. So much of the romantic-picturesque and the classical- romantic is no more. Deepdene has gone. East Cowes Castle has gone. The Grange has partly gone. May Downton remain.
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