Richard Payne Knight

Richard[2] Payne Knight (11 February 1751 – 23 April 1824) of Downton Castle in Herefordshire, and of 5 Soho Square,[3] London, England, was a classical scholar, connoisseur, archaeologist[4][5] and numismatist[5] best known for his theories of picturesque beauty and for his interest in ancient phallic imagery.

[3] But of even more value, he was the heir of his grandfather, who founded the family's fortune, Richard Knight[7] (1659–1745) of Downton Hall, a wealthy Ironmaster of Bringewood Ironworks.

[4] Beginning in 1814, he occupied the Towneley family trustee seat at the British Museum,[10][4] to which he bequeathed his collection of bronzes, coins, engraved gems, marbles, and drawings.

Knight died unmarried on 23 April 1824, and was buried in the churchyard of St Mary's Church, Wormsley,[11] where survives his chest tomb, now a grade II listed structure.

However, he also stated: Were it not for these last words, his will appeared to have created a trust, which would have precluded Charlotte from inheriting, as her father Thomas Knight died intestate and without male progeny, having been pre-deceased by his only son.

The judge decided that due to these last words in Payne's will, it had not been his intention to create a trust and therefore Thomas had inherited from him an absolute title in his property, which thus passed by law to his daughter.

In some ways the book was the first of many later attempts to argue that Pagan ideas had persisted within Christian culture, a view that would eventually crystallise into the neo-Pagan movement over a century later.

This book sought to explain the experience of "taste" within the mind and to clarify the theorisation of the concept of the picturesque, following from the writings of William Gilpin and Uvedale Price on the subject.

Knight's view was that artists should seek to reproduce primal visual sensations, not the mental interpretative processes which give rise to abstract ideas.

However, it most directly justifies the practices of contemporary painters of picturesque landscapes, such as Girtin, whose stippling effects are comparable to Knight's account of pleasing colour combinations.

Here Knight shows the influence of the contemporary cult of sensibility, arguing that these arts engage our sympathies, and in so doing demonstrate the inadequacy of 2rules and systems" in both morality and aesthetics.

Knight's emphasis on the roles of sensation and of emotion were constitutive of later Romantic and Victorian aesthetic thinking, as was his vexed struggle with the relation between moral feeling and sensuous pleasure.

Though some contemporaries condemned the basis of his thought as an aestheticised libertinism, or devotion to physical sensation, they influenced John Ruskin's attempts to theorise the Romantic aesthetic of Turner, and to integrate political and pictorial values.