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The Review of English Studies 2000 51(201):41-61; doi:10.1093/res/51.201.41
© 2000 by Oxford University Press
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Richard van Bleeck's painting of William Congreve as contemplative (1715)

DF McKenzie

Pembroke College Oxford, Oxford, UK

Richard van Bleeck's painting of William Congreve in 1715 includes at least four allusions which, in sum, make it a literary and philosophical portrait celebrating a close association with John Vanbrugh and an intellectual debt to George Berkeley, while also implying a physical reason for his withdrawal into a more contemplative world. The objects which permit such a reading are the book Congreve holds (a manuscript of Vanbrugh's plays The Relapse and The Provoked Wife), a printed book with Berkeley's name on the spine which must at that date allude to his writings on optics and theories of perception, a watch which in this context may suggest Berkeley's definition of time as a succession of discrete ideas, and the declination of Congreve's eyes as an indication of his impaired vision and his disposition to find his reality less in the material world than in the mental one of ideas. It is a portrait unnoted by English writers on Congreve and offers a view of the man significantly different from the familiar one read into Sir Godfrey Kneller's painting of 1709.


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