Female body sketch
Thus begins Jonathan Richardson’s essay An Argument in Behalf of the Science of a Connoisseur, the second discourse of his Two Discourses (1719), a treatise that promotes connoisseurship as a new and innovative practice, necessary for the appreciation and assessment of art. My present business is then in short to persuade our Nobility, and Gentry to become Lovers of Painting and Connoisseurs. I open to Gentlemen a New Scene of Pleasure, a New Innocent Amusement, and an Accomplishment which they have yet scarce heard of, but no less worthy of their Attention…. Keywords: connoisseurship, spectatorship, art, aesthetics, beauty, sexuality, painting, performance, theatre More fundamentally, it places women at the center of connoisseurial debates in the period, contending that depictions of women’s bodies within connoisseurial contexts function at once as emblems of knowledge, both aesthetic and concupiscent, and as emblems that ironize and destabilize such knowledge by cultivating a fiction of the profound unknowability of women-and thus of beauty itself. Drawing upon recent scholarship, it charts a history of “body connoisseurship” from the Society of Dilettanti, to London’s Theatres Royal, to the Royal Academy of Arts, and reveals how the focus on the female physique-as an object of beauty, sex, ownership, and exchange-was shaped not only by men but also by women who exerted increasing control over their own representational narratives. This article examines the contemporary intersection between aesthetic appreciation and the act of viewing the female form. With the development of connoisseurship in eighteenth-century England came new scrutiny of the female body.