Forebears

James Gillray
Ministerial Eloquence
(William Pitt the Younger)
1795
hand-colored etching
British Museum

Jean-Honoré Fragonard
Girl Reading
ca. 1769
oil on canvas
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

James Gillray
Bar Eloquence
(Thomas Erskine, 1st Baron Erskine)
1795
hand-colored etching
British Museum

Jean-Honoré Fragonard
Portrait of Anne François d'Harcourt, duc de Beuvron
ca. 1770
oil on canvas
Musée du Louvre

James Gillray
Military Eloquence
(Frederick Augustus, Duke of York)
1795
hand-colored etching
British Museum

Jean-Honoré Fragonard
Portrait of artist Charles Paul Jérôme Bréa
ca. 1769
oil on canvas
Musée du Louvre

James Gillray
Opposition Eloquence
(Charles James Fox)
1795
hand-colored etching
British Museum

Jean-Honoré Fragonard
Portrait of Marie Anne Éléonore, comtesse de Grave
1769
oil on canvas
Musée du Louvre

James Gillray
Naval Eloquence
(William Henry, Duke of Clarence)
1795
hand-colored etching
British Museum

Jean-Honoré Fragonard
Portrait présumé de Louis François Prault
ca. 1769
oil on canvas
Musée du Louvre

James Gillray
Pulpit Eloquence
(John Moore, Archbishop of Canterbury)
1795
hand-colored etching
British Museum

Jean-Honoré Fragonard
Rinaldo in the Garden of Armida
(scene from Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata)
ca. 1760-70
oil on canvas
Musée du Louvre

James Gillray
Fool's Eloquence
(James Maitland, 8th Earl of Lauderdale)
1795
hand-colored etching
British Museum

Jean-Honoré Fragonard
The Shepherdess
ca. 1750-52
oil on canvas
Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin

    It is delightful to repose on the wisdom of the ancients; to have some great name at hand, besides one's own initials always staring one in the face; to travel out of one's self into the Chaldee, Hebrew, and Egyptian characters; to have the palm-trees waving mystically in the margin of the page, and the camels moving slowly on in the distance of three thousand years.  In that dry desert of learning, we gather strength and patience, and a strange and insatiable thirst of knowledge.  The ruined monuments of antiquity are also there, and the fragments of buried cities (under which the adder lurks) and cool springs, and green sunny spots, and the whirlwind and the lion's roar, and the shadow of angelic wings.

– William Hazlitt (1778-1830)