Artistic Culture and the Book Trade in Late Seventeenth-Century London

Abstract

This article presents a fresh assessment of artists’ intellectual training in England during the seventeenth century, primarily by a focus upon the auction sale catalogues of the libraries formerly belonging to Henry Cook (1642?-1700) and John Michael Wright (1617-1694). These catalogues provide two rare instances of contemporary evidence for artists’ reading habits in England. This article approaches these documents from the complementary perspectives of book history and the intellectual history of art, in order to assess both artists’ training against the norms and ideals established in Europe over the preceding century. At the same time, this article points to the significant ways in which each artist extended this inherited tradition of learning — for example towards natural philosophy, and Egyptology — and suggests that many of the items in each artist’s collection should also lead us to question prevailing distinctions between ‘visual’ and ‘textual’ kinds of knowledge in the history of art and elsewhere.