This article considers what might have happened had the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury lived long enough to see his planned book of art theory, Second Characters, into publication. It suggests that Second Characters would have challenged, and perhaps supplanted, Jonathan Richardson the Elder’s Theory of Painting (1715) as the first substantial and original British contribution to the theory of art. Much of the article consists of a comparison between Richardson’s Theory of Painting and the ‘Plasticks’ section of Second Characters, for which Shaftsbury’s notes survive. This comparison suggests that the theory of painting which Shaftesbury would have offered to his compatriots would have differed from that offered by Richardson in certain important respects. Primarily addressing his text to his fellow aristocratic patrons rather than to painters, Shaftesbury’s vision for the future of British art was both more high-minded and more narrow than that offered by Richardson. For Shaftesbury the moral subject matter of painting was all-important, and the artistic traits he most admired, including historical subjects, grandeur of scale and austerity of style, were those he saw as best placed to transmit that moral subject matter. Richardson, by contrast, was for more tolerant of the extant British taste for portraits and more sensual styles and offered a theory of art which was in part formalist. The article also stresses the importance of the equation Shaftesbury made between the social and political health of a society and the quality of its art, and suggests that had Second Characters been published at the time when it was written we might now consider Shaftesbury, rather than Winckelmann, as the father of the social history of art. The article ends by considering two possible outcomes had Second Characters been published in the early eighteenth century, in one of which it had a profound impact on British art and British attitudes to art, and in the other of which Shaftesbury’s refusal to compromise with current British tastes condemned his text to no more than a marginal status.

This article discusses Shaftesbury’s fragmentary ‘Dictionary of art terms’, an appendix to the unfinished Plastics, and its relevance in establishing an aesthetic and moral art theory in Britain. The article argues that, although the ‘Dictionary’ is rudimentary, it already reveals enough information to assess it as an important document of English art philosophy. Given that Shaftesbury’s dictionary project was the first English attempt to produce a theoretical art dictionary, it is discussed in the light of traditions of the art dictionary in this country. The study clarifies notions of the dictionary’s art terms through comparative analyses with the use of the words in the aesthetic discourses in the Plastics. It looks at Shaftesbury’s creation of novel words based on classical literature and his use of contemporary literary sources which was partly ambivalent, for fear that only words were transferred from their original context but no ideologies that the author disapproved of. With the help of exemplary discussions of Shaftesbury’s art vocabulary, the study illustrates the shaping of an aesthetic vocabulary in England.

In the early 18th century, British art theory was an almost virgin field, open to inevitable influences from the continent. Anthony Ashley Cooper, the Third Lord of Shaftesbury, who devoted the last years of his life to various problems of art, made an attempt to create the first serious theory of art in England. In this article, I try to show that Shaftesbury was faced with the need to choose between two competing approaches to art widespread in France at the turn of the century: the traditional approach, based on the poetic understanding of painting, the essence of which was history and its moral meaning, and the new one, proposed by Roger de Piles, based on the action of color and light and shade, which create a comprehensive visual effect independent of the story presented in the picture. Shaftesbury took a traditional approach, driven by moral fears and rather reluctant to make sensual pleasure the goal of art. At the same time, he appropriated the key concepts of Roger de Piles: the pictorial unity and the whole picture, ignoring the ideas associated with them. This should be understood as a half-measure that allowed him to modernize the language of art without the danger of compromising the moral importance of painting.