Alexander Pope
Artist: Jonathan Richardson (English, 1667-1745)
Date: ca. 1737
Medium: Oil on canvas
Collection: National Portrait Gallery, London, United Kingdom
Sitter: Alexander Pope
Pope was the most famous poet of his time, despite being marginalized in some ways by 18th-century society because of his Catholicism and chronic illness. The son of a linen-draper, Pope was first noticed by Jacob Tonson who published his Pastorals in 1709. With The Rape of the Lock, 1712, and his translations of Homer, Pope became the most formidable literary figure of his day. Primarily a satirical poet and of unsurpassed metrical skill, he wrote 'what oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed'. Pope had a wide circle of friends and admirers but also many literary enemies. His poetry was often satirical and sometimes vicious in attacking his contemporaries. Many of his pithy phrases have become common sayings, such as ‘fools rush in where angels fear to tread’ and ‘a little learning is a dangerous thing’. A friend of Swift and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and famous in the history of landscape gardening for the grounds of his villa at Twickenham, he was revered as one of the great personalities of the age.
