Dryden's Portrait of Kneller in "To Sir Godfrey Kneller"

The most recent studies of “To Sir Godfrey Kneller” have emphasized the personal worries, rivalry, and envy that Dryden was feeling in his financially insecure 1690s. ¹ However, despite the general acknowledgment among critics of the offhand, political jabs that Dryden levels at William and his court in the poem, I would like to place a greater focus on how Dryden uses Kneller as a figure who mirrors William’s political world and all that is wrong with it. The poem is addressed to Kneller as well as to the culture at large in an attempt to make both realize how the realm of art, as discussed by Dryden primarily through the subject of imitation in the sister arts, could present two different ideological standards of value and meaningfulness: one represented by Dryden and ostensibly Kneller; and one represented by William’s England, which is described in the poem as in a state of cultural degeneration and which Dryden shows Kneller to be implicated in.

By 1694, the year “To Sir Godfrey Kneller” was published, Dryden had had six years to get used to the idea that he was no longer the Poet Laureate and was marginalized culturally, not only as a Jacobite but also as a Catholic. This prevailing sense of alienation in “To Sir Godfrey Kneller” led Earl Miner to call this poem Dryden’s Eikon Basilike. ² As a deposed cultural figure, Dryden speaks of his sense of aesthetics and history in opposition to the prevalent trends around him. Through this discussion, Dryden gives a unified view of meaning, artistic as well as social and political, that is counter to the emergent culture of the Whigs. And in a typically ironic gesture, Dryden here uses the occasion of praise to unleash an attack on that culture by not too subtly deriding its “painter” laureate. ³ As in “To my Kinsman, John Driden,” Dryden creates in this poem a persona against which to compare and define himself, a persona that is a kind of projected self. In the later poem, the model is positive; here the model is negative. In the later poem, Dryden’s cousin, the retired figure, is painted in an idyllic realm, one Dryden identifies himself with; in “To Sir Godfrey Kneller,” Kneller, the painter who has usurped Dryden’s former function as a legitimate artist, is the figure of cultural degeneration Dryden defines himself against.

In “To Sir Godfrey Kneller,” Dryden uses the link between poetry and painting that was a commonplace of seventeenth-century culture, summed up in the ut pictura poesis dictum from Horace as well as Simonides’ saying, attributed by Plutarch, that “painting is mute poetry, poetry a speaking picture.” ⁴ In its attempt to establish itself as a liberal art and not merely a mechanical trade, which it had long been considered, painting had used this link to poetry to justify its tardy inclusion among the more established arts, all of which had an ancient pedigree. Critics in the liberal humanist tradition of painting, as Rensselaer Lee defines it, assumed

...that painting, like poetry, was the imitation of human action, and it followed... that it must resemble the sister art in subject matter, in human content and in purpose. If the painter’s inventions were to be comparable to those of the poet in power, depth, or beauty, he must choose themes from ancient and modern poetry, and from history sacred and profane; his genius was said to have its most intimate affinities with the poet’s in his power to express human emotion; his aim like the poet’s was assumed to be serious, for he must aspire not merely to give pleasure, but to impart wisdom to mankind.

(p. 67)

However, despite the presence of this tradition, painting always had to fight against its association with mechanical trades; even as late as the time Dryden wrote “To Sir Godfrey Kneller,” painting was still officially supervised by the Painter-Stationer’s Company, which was established in Elizabethan England to regulate all painting, from portraiture to sign painting. In an effort to combat this lower...