'POETIC PICTURE, PAINTED POETRY': A STUDY OF RESTORATION ADVICE-TO-A-PAINTER POEMS

The Restoration Advices to Painters are infrequently studied. Perhaps the least appreciated aspect of the genre is the imagery, which, in the satiric examples, inverts many of the popular heroic painting topoi of the day. Graphic caricature was rare when the Advices flourished in the 1660's, and the form seems to have satisfied a need to expose distortions in the political art of the period. This fortuitous concurrence of form and historical moment accounts for the painter poem's extreme but short-lived popularity.; The Advice to a Painter was popularized in 1666 as the form for a large-scale poem by Edmund Waller's panegyric, Instructions to a Painter. Waller adopted the form as a mode for royalist propaganda and tried to create a persona who was the poetic counterpart of a heroic painter. But it became obvious in Instructions to a Painter that the techniques of magnification and exaggeration employed by painters did not readily lend themselves to translation into poetry. Satirists immediately perceived Waller's difficulty and took advantage of it, and the parodic Second Advice to a Painter immediately followed (1666). This poem introduced to a major generic innovation: inversion of heroic painting topoi.; The three best satiric examples of the genre--the anonymous Second Advice to a Painter, Third Advice to a Painter, and Andrew Marvell's The Last Instructions to a Painter--are built upon imaginary grotesques and cartoons. A famous series of paintings parodied in the Second Advice is Sir Peter Lely's Lowestoft Admirals; in the Third Advice, the court beauty topos popularized in Lely's Windsor Beauties is travestied in the portrait of the Duchess of Albemarle. In The Last Instructions, the most ambitious of the satires, Marvell creates a gallery of caricatures that represents the ambience of the Restoration Court. Everything from large-scale battle paintings to heroic portraiture is included in an indecorous, nightmarish gallery that violates both Horace's principles of imagistic decorum (in the Ars Poetica) and the traditional practice of displaying paintings according to genre. Thus political and moral corruption are mirrored aesthetically.; In 1695, some thirty years after the painter poems' heyday, John Dryden wrote a verse epistle, "To Sir Godfrey Kneller," that is an important pendant to the Advice-to-a-Painter genre. Dryden exploits an aspect of the painter poem that was always implicit in the genre but never fully developed--the disparity between painter and poet. Although the poem has most often been read as a panegyric, it is a subtle criticism of Kneller's artistic limitations and of a patronage system that forced artists to compromise their values in order to survive.; The Advice-to-a-Painter genre deteriorated after its heyday because the form became a cul-de-sac. The inversion of painting topoi was a kind of parody that is funny and original a few times but not repeatedly, and the rise of the verse epistle, equally ancient but more flexible, helped the Advice-to-a-Painter poem to die. Nevertheless, the major innovation of the painter satires--imagistic inversions--met an artistic need that would later be satisfied more fully by the rise of graphic caricature.