Literature and the Arts: Interdisciplinary Essays in Memory of James Anderson Winn

By Anna Battigelli, Steven N. Zwicker, Amanda Eubanks Winkler and 8 more

The ten essays in Literature and the Arts explore the intermedial plenitude of eighteenth-century English culture, honoring the memory of James Anderson Winn, whose work demonstrated how seeing that interplay of the arts and literature was essential to a full understanding of Restoration and eighteenth-century English culture. Scenery, machinery, music, dance, and texts transformed one another, both enriching and complicating generic distinctions. Artists were alive to the power of the arts to reflect and shape reality, and their audience was quick to turn to the arts as performative pleasures and critical lenses through which to understand a changing world. This collection's eminent authors discuss estate design, musicalized theater, the visual spectacle of musical performance, stage machinery and set designs, the social uses of painting and singing, drama’s reflection of a transformed military infrastructure, and the arts of memory and of laughter.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Delaware Press
• Release date: Oct 13, 2023
• ISBN: 9781644533130

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Introduction

ANNA BATTIGELLI

The essays in this volume were written in memory of James Anderson Winn, whose prolific career enriched our understanding of the affectively powerful intertwining of literature and the arts during England’s long eighteenth century (1660–1815). As a literary scholar, a flutist, and an indefatigable advocate on behalf of the humanities, he lived by his claim that much of what humanists study originates in performance, and all good teaching ought to be alert to the living excitement of arts and ideas, eager to dramatize that excitement through fresh performative gestures.¹ His training in classical music made him particularly well suited to the study of eighteenth-century England, which, as John Brewer reminds us, invented our modern ideas of ‘high culture.’ ² Winn’s teaching and scholarship were replete with literary, artistic, and musical examples, fully in keeping with the multimedia liveliness of Restoration stage spectacle. Students will remember his rapid-fire repetition of the series beat, bit, bet, bat, boat, bought, which he used to illustrate the descending overtones of pitch in this sequence of vowels. He demonstrated the poetic deployment of this descent by reciting John Milton’s description of Satan’s cosmic fall in Book 1 of Paradise Lost.³ His performance of Milton’s words encouraged students to move beyond merely comprehending poetry to experiencing it. His teaching included sensational acoustic and visual tours of London that explored its history, politics, and literature through its paintings, ceiling frescoes, architecture, stage settings, dance, songs, and texts. For him, awareness of the interplay of the arts was essential to a full understanding of Restoration and eighteenth-century culture. His work was always interdisciplinary, and though he did not use the word intermedial, he anticipated recent claims within intermedia studies that individual media are rarely discrete categories.⁴ His goal was that students absorb the artistic activities of eighteenth-century culture with pleasure and understanding. Like Walter Pater, he encouraged an awareness that every art has its own peculiar and untranslatable sensuous charm … its own special mode of reaching the imagination.⁵ He also insisted, however, that a text or any work of art be experienced not in isolation but in its transformative engagement with other texts and art forms.

Winn argued that a coherent history of Restoration stage production—plays, musicalized theater, oratorios, and full opera—required understanding how Restoration artists engaged with the arts collaboratively, combining text, music, dance, and stage spectacle, including elaborate stage machinery. He also pointed to the shared conventions shaping both rhymed heroic drama and the Italian operas produced in England by George Frideric Handel and others: both showcased exotic settings, royal characters facing threats to their authority, stage spectacle, and the supernatural.⁶ Citing these commonalities, he proposed a unified, less categorical account of the wide variety of dramatic forms in this period. Winn’s revised history offered an alternative to both the standard view of English theatrical history, in which the rhymed heroic play is seen as a brief, failed attempt to import French literary conventions, and the standard view of European operatic history, in which the stubborn English resistance to opera suddenly yields to the unique genius of Handel.⁷ As Andrew Walkling has noted elsewhere, Winn’s effort to embrace those non-traditional aspects of theatrical performance that often go unremarked by literary scholars represents an important step toward a genuine acknowledgment of the totalizing entertainment … that Baroque theatre represents.⁸ For Amanda Eubanks Winkler, it is precisely this efflorescence of multiple kinds of media and the intersection among them during the Restoration period … [that] made its culture distinct: dramatick opera was but one manifestation of a larger impulse.⁹

In his history of the often-strained relations between music and literature, Unsuspected Eloquence (1981), Winn drew parallels between poetic analysis and music theory. He acknowledged affinities between the syntactical parallelism of Alexander Pope’s rhymed couplets and the tonal modulations of Joseph Haydn’s string quartets, where a note or phrase we first hear in one tonal context suddenly reveals a new meaning in another context.¹⁰ He noted that eighteenth-century writers linked poetry and painting, drawing on Horace’s ut pictura poesis to produce the " ‘visually centered sensationalist aesthetics’ promulgated in Joseph Addison’s famous series of Spectator essays on the ‘Pleasures of the Imagination.’ ¹¹ But even as he traced the overlapping of the arts, he also expressed concern for the growing divide throughout the eighteenth century between poetic and musical practice, a divide that led John Hollander in the twentieth century to declare that music and poetry have become utterly different as human enterprises.¹² Though both Joseph Addison and Alexander Pope wrote St. Cecilia odes, for example, both criticized the absurdities of the Italian opera.¹³ When Pope asked that poetry imitate music’s nameless graces which no method seeks," he betrayed an ignorance of eighteenth-century music, which was far from unmethodical—its methods were taught through rules and structured exercises.¹⁴ Later, when Romantic poets replaced rhetorical structure with organic form or associative meaning, they similarly departed from Romantic composers’ use of a methodical semiotics of the passions.

Steeped in both music and literature, Winn urged literary scholars and others to remove disciplinary barriers by becoming familiar, as he was, with the lived practice of other arts. It was his hope that we might reconsider Romantic literary and text-bound assumptions behind concepts such as original genius and return to more productive concepts of artistry that acknowledge the long apprenticeship and mastery of tradition required for any artistic development. Virtuosity, he argued, was not some mesmerized automatic communication of emotion.¹⁵ He asserted that we benefit from appreciating the intertwining of the arts and from understanding them as performative practices requiring long study. Seeing the relationship between artists as both collaborative and warily competitive might also help us better comprehend the complex and even contradictory movements within the historical shift from mimetic to expressive concepts of art.¹⁶

His attention to the interplay of the arts was particularly revelatory in his biographies of artists and historical figures. Both John Dryden and His World (1987) and When Beauty Fires the Blood: Love and the Arts in the Age of Dryden (1992) present Dryden as an astute reinventor of English culture in the aftermath of Reformation and civil war.¹⁷ Winn unearthed the many levels of Dryden’s mind in large part by examining Dryden’s informed and active engagement with composers and painters. On a personal level, Dryden felt both mesmerized and irascible when collaborating with artists: he gleefully used the arts to elevate and ennoble his stage productions, even as he insisted possessively on writing’s superiority to the other arts. On a poetic level, he grumbled about the technical challenges of composing lyrics for music in English, a Germanic language whose many monosyllables, consonants, and infrequent rhymes complicated the task of writing lyrics.¹⁸ On a polemical level, he equated disregard for the arts with political negligence. He praised Henry Purcell for composing music with so great a Genius, that he has nothing to fear but an ignorant, ill-judging Audience and commiserated with the painter Sir Godfrey Kneller, doomed to work in the artistically unengaged court of William III: Thus in a stupid Military State / The Pen and Pencil find an equal Fate.¹⁹ Winn read Dryden’s genuine praise for these artists as implicit criticism of political leaders and citizens who enfeebled the nation through their neglect of the arts—and with that neglect limited the capacity for complex thought facilitated by the arts.

By drawing on the arts, Winn also radically revised our understanding of Queen Anne in Queen Anne: Patroness of the Arts (2014).²⁰ That volume’s beautiful illustrations and companion website with musical examples helped replace the portrait of a dull, uninspiring monarch with that of an intelligent woman alert to the power of the arts. Her beautiful, well-trained voice, deep familiarity with court theater, and attention to artists, particularly Handel, helped her support the arts in both court ceremonials and public celebrations. Like her predecessor, Elizabeth I, Anne drew on political theater. She adopted Elizabeth’s motto—semper eadem—and proclaimed her heart to be "entirely English, an echo of Elizabeth’s claim at Tilbury to have the heart and Stomach of a King and of a King of England too."²¹ Six months after her inauguration, Anne choreographed a royal progress to Bath also echoing Elizabeth’s pageantry. Like Elizabeth, she revived the royal touch, the laying on of hands to cure those suffering from diseases such as scrofula. Winn notes that, on her way to Bath, she was received at Oxford with verses by students including the nineteen-year-old Heneage Finch, who fused the artistic power of the muses with the military power of soldiers, creating a fitting iconography of female military and domestic power:

Our Muses hear the Battles from afar,

And sing the Triumphs, and enjoy the War.

This now, but soon the quivering Spear they’l weild,

And lead the shouting Squadrons to the field.²²

Finch’s fusion of the muses with Amazonian militarism helped create a language supporting a woman’s monarchical authority.

Much later, Nahum Tate similarly depicted Anne’s monarchical power by portraying her well-trained voice exerting a calming effect on a restless and unsettled citizenry:

But Doubly Blest who saw and heard her Speak!

They heard the Spheres, and saw the Morning break:

A presence so Angelic as could Charm

And Malecontents of all their Rage disarm;

Accents that Storms of Discord could Dispel,

While Softer They than shedding Roses fell.²³

In Tate’s hyperbole, Winn detected a feminized appropriation of the Aeneid’s first simile, through which Virgil compares Neptune’s abating of the ocean’s stormy waves to the power of an orator calming crowds. His biography similarly highlights Anne’s understanding and successful deployment of the performative power of art. The multimedia celebration of the British victory at the Battle of Blenheim, for instance, can be found in sermons, paintings, tapestries, church anthems, poems—and in the splendor of Blenheim Palace, built at the Queen’s request by John Vanbrugh to commemorate John Churchill’s most famous victory. Even as court patronage gave way to civic and commercial forces, the Queen played a significant role in shaping a national self-understanding that required the arts for its full expression. Not coincidentally, it was during the eighteenth century that English literature, music, and painting received systematic analyses for the first time.²⁴

Winn consistently demonstrated that eighteenth-century artists were alive to the power of art to both reflect and shape reality, and that their audience was similarly quick to approach the arts as both performative pleasures and critical lenses through which to better understand a rapidly changing world.²⁵ As the engine of the arts shifted away from the court to more commercial entities, new urban spaces emerged for the public consumption of art, such as concert halls, art galleries and exhibit halls, clubs, reading societies, coffeehouses, circulating libraries, pleasure gardens, printshops, and alehouses. Each provided access to the arts for a citizenry interested in the social, aesthetic, and political uses of the arts. Prints and engravings were increasingly available for purchase, periodical essays offered tutorials on taste and judgment, and miscellanies and anthologies such as Vicesimus Knox’s Elegant Extracts volumes compiled edifying excerpts. Jane Austen could signal the social aspirations of the self-improving farmer Robert Martin in Emma by having him read excerpts from Knox’s volumes aloud to his mother and sisters in his tidy parlor.

At all levels of society, literature and the arts played a defining role for a nation and citizenry in search of an identity. One has only to think of the performative power of the printed ballad—what one scholar calls the ultimate intermedia cultural artifact—which could transform environments by stimulating critical or satirical commentary, signaling political allegiance, and even inciting recitation, song, and other, more rowdy action.²⁶ A song or tune could migrate from ballad to ballad opera or play, transforming genres; text and music were infinitely mutable, circulating beyond traditional generic categories.²⁷ Within the rough-and-tumble sphere of eighteenth-century politics, battles over representing the nation were waged through art, from the court-inspired masque to street politics, with its pageants and public ceremonies.²⁸

If we turn to the eighteenth century’s characteristic sociability, we see that friendship was almost unimaginable apart from its expressive self-definition through the arts. One has only to think of the many friends who celebrated their shared artistic interests by exchanging or commissioning works of art, or performing music together. The members of the Kit-Cat Club sat for Sir Godfrey Kneller. Ignatius Sancho received a bust of Laurence Sterne from his friend, the sculptor John Nollekens.²⁹ Alexander Pope memorialized friends through his verse epistles. The indefatigable Handel played music late into the night in his friends’ drawing rooms. Women and men commissioned portraits of their friends. Margaret Cavendish Harley, Duchess of Portland, commissioned a small gold and enamel friendship box, now in the National Portrait Gallery, with miniature portraits of her, Elizabeth Montagu, Mary Delany, and Mary Howard, Lady Andover, to whom she left the box in her will. Attending to friendship helps us see women’s intellectual and artistic activities more fully.³⁰

Scholars such as Elizabeth Eger acknowledge that both eighteenth-century arts and public discussions of the arts highlighted women’s roles as cultural standard bearers of considerable influence.³¹ As Eger explains, women emerged in eighteenth-century discussions of art as full participants in the nation’s cultural and social progress. She points to Richard Samuel’s painting Portraits in the Characters of the Muses in the Temple of Apollo (1778), reproduced on the cover of this volume, as depicting key members of the Bluestocking circle as both real and symbolic figures.³² Significantly, an engraving of the painting, published in advance of the painting’s exhibition at the Royal Academy, perhaps to drum up interest, replaced the figure of Apollo with that of Britannia, an acknowledgment of the nation’s reliance on the arts for full self-expression.³³ By depicting real-life artists as muses both interacting with one another and representing national culture, Samuel pointed to women’s roles within the arts. Samuel’s attention to these roles and, more generally, to the collaborative interaction between the arts represents an approach to the arts that James Winn both appreciated and advanced.

The chapters of a memorial volume cannot present a comprehensive view of their topic, but we hope that these essays pay tribute to Winn’s informed interdisciplinary methodology, whether they do so through intermedia studies, through searching out the intertwining and overlapping of the arts, or through studies of how the mind—itself an ultimate medium—collects, rearranges, re-sorts, and reshapes memories, narratives, news, propaganda, and artwork. Steven N. Zwicker examines the laughter provoked by the satirical strain of the Restoration’s fierce political battles over the tropes and pictorialism of Restoration satire. The series of charged literary transactions he traces remind us that the unresolved aesthetic legacy of the English Reformation animated a great deal of Restoration literature. He considers the battle over art as it seeped into discussions of rhyme, which Opposition poets viewed as excessively artificial. Dryden’s cheeky rendering of John Milton’s blank verse epic Paradise Lost into operatic rhymed couplets in The State of Innocence—to say nothing of Dryden’s dedication of his opera to Mary of Modena, an iconic figure representing Catholicism’s inroads into English political life—was one such attempt to reclaim literary authority from a solidly Puritan antiestablishment figure such as Milton. Andrew Marvell’s immediate response, "On Mr Milton’s Paradise Lost," uses rhyme parodically to lambast Dryden,³⁴ and Milton’s own preface to the 1674 edition of Paradise Lost similarly dismisses rhyme derisively. Zwicker notes that the Earl of Rochester mocked Dryden’s rhymed drama in The Rehearsal Transpros’d, perhaps angered by Dryden’s description of him in the preface to All for Love as this rhyming judge of the twelve-penny gallery.³⁵ Finally, Jonathan Swift mocked Dryden’s literary pretensions by depicting him in The Battle of the Books as dwarfed by his armor, lamely attempting to join the ancients he so revered. We see in these parodic presentations and representations the vehemence with which Dryden’s allegiance to the Stuarts—and later his unrelenting public conversion to Catholicism—complicated and animated his readers’ responses. The aesthetic derision of laughter became a response to Dryden because his work, with its not infrequent manifestation of baroque splendor, celebrated literary artifice in ways that discomfited his Whig contemporaries.³⁶

A different discordant engagement with humor emerges from Amanda Eubanks Winkler’s account of her pioneering collaboration with Richard Schoch examining the modern audience’s experience of Restoration adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays. Eubanks Winkler and Schoch brought scholars and actors together at the Folger Theatre in Washington, D.C., in fall 2018 to produce William Davenant’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. The resulting production confirmed Eubanks Winkler’s claim that dramatic opera functions through its intermediality, as the special effects—sonic, visual, and verbal—caused by stage machines, trapdoors, dance, song, and script compete with one another syncretically to create inventive interpretive possibilities.³⁷ Eubanks Winkler reports that, at first, the seemingly discordant elements of Davenant’s adaptation seemed unworkable. For example, the director Robert Richmond worried that the jubilant music that John Eccles composed for the witches’ songs did not properly mimic their malicious intentions. But the audience responded positively to the dissonant spectacle of malevolent supernatural beings singing jaunty music while signaling malice through their grotesque gestures. Like Samuel Pepys, who found Davenant’s production one of the best plays for a stage, and variety of dancing and music, that ever I saw, the modern audience appreciated its music and spectacle, seeing the irony of upbeat sounds conveying evil.³⁸ For Eubanks Winkler, the audience’s receptivity to an aesthetics alien to its own time provides evidence of Gertrude Stein’s concept of syncopated time—a moment in which past and present are both operative.

Paul Hammond traces Dryden’s use of memory as it ranges through historical poems, epics, and propaganda as vital to his work as Historiographer Royal. Dryden’s historiographical role drove him to shape national self-understanding, in large part by shaping the nation’s collective memory. Absalom and Achitophel is a key moment in Dryden’s effort to preserve cultural myths and national concepts vulnerable to corruption. In this battle—waged through the mind’s intermedial capacity to collect, reject, repurpose, and reorder memory—he turned to Milton’s Paradise Lost, appropriating Miltonic language to overturn or invert Miltonic ideology. Where Milton feared tyranny, Dryden feared lawless individualism. By deploying Miltonic language in his own Stuart mythmaking, Dryden disabled the tropes of Whig rhetoric. His Achitophel corrupts key terms of public discourse, such as religion, commonwealth, and liberty by transforming them into mob-inspired shouts and cries. Hammond finds a quieter and more personal appropriation of Opposition poetry in Dryden’s responses to the works of Marvell, his most brilliant political and literary rival. Keenly aware that Marvell, both a member of Parliament and the leading Whig polemicist, skillfully opposed his work as Historiographer Royal point for point, Dryden echoed and inverted Marvell’s work throughout his career. Hammond observes Dryden reworking the Horatian Ode in both Absalom and Achitophel and most remarkably in Threnodia Augustalis (1685), his elegy for Charles II. In the latter poem, Hammond finds linguistic and prosodic echoes of Marvell’s Horatian Ode at the very moment depicting the transfer of power from Charles to his brother James. Dryden’s transposition of Marvell’s language celebrating the chief regicide into language signaling the ongoing nature of monarchy was a form of controlling and preserving royalist memory and history.

A different affective approach to national mythmaking is discussed by Andrew Walkling, who considers stage machines and settings used in Dryden’s operatic spectacle Albion and Albanius. Walkling’s point of departure is the liminality of English society, in which rational empiricism coexisted side by side with belief in the supernatural. As he puts it, the affective power of astonishment continued to wield substantial influence even as the empirical methods of the Royal Society gained ground. As illustration, he offers two related events: the first is the production of Albion and Albanius, with its supernatural deities inhabiting recognizable London spaces, and the second is the celestial phenomenon of ice halos off the coast of France meticulously recorded by Captain Christopher Gunman. Gunman’s depiction of three suns surrounded by three rainbows somehow reached Dorset Garden as the company was producing Dryden’s baroque theatrical allegory. By their account, the drawing inspired the design of the large machine on which the goddess Iris enters the stage. The stage directions within the opera’s printed text specifically link Iris’s machine to Gunman’s observations. Walkling’s term for this blending of the otherworldly and worldly is diegetic supernaturalism.³⁹ Walkling’s discoveries of two copies of Gunman’s illustrations unearth new ways of understanding the use of Gunman’s observations in the production. He notes that Gunman’s empirical description of celestial phenomena could coexist with the play’s artistically imagined religious understanding of concepts of kingship. Albion and Albanius was forced to close upon the Duke of Monmouth’s invasion, thereby losing revenue desperately needed to cover the cost of its elaborate stage effects. Yet this loss of revenue does not indicate dramatic failure. That the play’s detractors mocked its peacocks and rainbows suggests that they registered the astonishment and wonder evoked by its diegetic supernaturalism.

David Hopkins looks at a politically resonant material space in which literature and the arts were experienced by turning to the baroque mansion Dyrham Park, built between 1691 and 1702 by the statesman and amateur violinist William Blathwayt. Blathwayt’s interactions with three men—his friend Sir William Temple, his steward and secretary Giles Jacob, and his musically gifted son, John Blathwayt—reflect the breadth of ongoing cultural activity at Dyrham Park that occurred while Blathwayt worked as secretary of state to William III. Blathwayt’s interest in Epicurus, an interest he shared with Temple, is reflected both in the books in the Dyrham library and in the inscriptions placed over the Orangery and the south front of Dyrham Park. His Williamite affiliation is reflected in the statue of Neptune celebrating William of Orange’s naval success. Yet Blathwayt’s library also held John Dryden’s anti-Williamite translation of The Works of Virgil. Blathwayt’s secretary Jacob was significantly chastised by Alexander Pope for his literary pretenses in The Dunciad (1728), but Blathwayt’s library held the very books that Pope defended against the pollutions of Grub Street. Blathwayt’s son John achieved renown on both the harpsichord and organ, performing in European cities, attending operas by Domenico Scarlatti, purchasing two Cremona violins for his father, and taking lessons from Bernado Pasquini, the friend of Arcangelo Corelli. He even accompanied Corelli. Back in London, he sang tenor solos and patronized musicians. William Blathwayt’s placement of a Horatian inscription in a south-facing pediment—his utere mecum—invites visitors to Dyrham Park to experience the estate’s abundant aesthetic pleasures with him in all their contradiction, perhaps as a tonic to the polarization of political life.⁴⁰ The range of cultural activity at Dyrham Park telegraphs culture and status, but it also suggests the arts’ therapeutic power to soothe and even unite souls wearied by the estrangement born of political divisions.

Cedric D. Reverand reminds us of Domenico Scarlatti’s definition of his sonatas as ingenious Jesting with Art as evidence that Scarlatti’s sonatas must be seen as well as heard. The sonatas are technically challenging miniatures, short pieces of no longer than six minutes. But they are also a form of performance art, with technically demanding notations that force the performer’s technological proficiency to become visible. Scarlatti’s musical notation on his scores, particularly his instructions regarding cross-handed passages, makes the visual spectacle of the performer’s bodily expression, as hand leaps over hand, an essential part of the musical performance. Together with the fast tempos, abrupt key changes, and elaborate passage work that sometimes crashes into chords, the cross-handed passages force audience members to notice the performer in the act of producing music. That Scarlatti used tone clusters that didn’t become common in classical music until the twentieth century makes his work particularly memorable. The Italian-born composer who worked for two Spanish kings became wildly popular in England. Leading musicians formed a Scarlatti cult enthralled by the virtuosity evident in both the auditory experiences and the visual spectacles Scarlatti created.

Turning to eighteenth-century plays, Paula Backscheider explores a different form of performance by reviewing Queen Anne’s twin attention to both theater and the war effort. Backscheider notes two aspects of drama performed during Anne’s reign: many plays were written by war veterans interested in supporting the war effort, and these plays highlight the increasing role of women within an expanding military infrastructure. The Duke of Marlborough viewed women as necessary for his restructured military; he had them care for the wounded, perform as surgeons, forage for food, cook, clean, sew, carry gear and munitions, set up camps, repair sails, mend clothes, and serve as sex workers. The camp-followers in plays by war veterans Colley Cibber, George Farquhar, and Charles Shadwell depict women performing this work. Backscheider details other military work historically performed by women, including gathering firewood, making soap, serving alcohol, providing directions to the many foreign soldiers in the English army, and peddling wares of use to soldiers. By pairing Queen Anne’s visible support for both war and theater with less visible work performed by women in the camps, she reveals the varied roles women played in Marlborough’s military.

Ellen Harris sheds new light on Anne Donnellan’s artistic activity by tracing how her financial acumen helped support her interest in the arts. Spurned by her family as a financial drain when she refused to marry, Donnellan nevertheless lived independently and eventually established a household through shrewd investments that allowed her to participate in musical, artistic, and literary activities. A talented singer who attended operas and concerts in London from childhood, she participated in family concerts from an early age. In London she also met her lasting friend Mary Delany, who often accompanied Donnellan’s singing at the keyboard. Donnellan’s wise investments permitted her to infuse her friendships with art. She commissioned both a painting of herself to give to Delany and a painting of Handel (now lost) that she left to the British Museum. Before purchasing a harpsichord, she had Handel vet it, and he sometimes accompanied her at the keyboard when she sang. She was appreciated for her music criticism, which is preserved only in the admiring descriptions of her correspondents, but her literary criticism is extant in letters. She was a part of Jonathan Swift’s circle, corresponded with both Edward Young and Samuel Richardson, and sang for Alexander Pope. Her early focus on moral character in literature may have been of interest to Richardson, with whom she corresponded as he composed Sir Charles Grandison. When she disposed of her art collection in her will, she specified that portions of the profits from its sale go to charities. Some of the paintings listed in the auction catalog suggest a Jacobite sensibility, and many demonstrate Donnellan’s interest in both women artists and British artists. Handel’s participation in the musical events she sponsored and his bequest of fifty guineas to her at his death suggest that he valued her hospitality and friendship. Harris shows how attending to women’s friendship helps reveal the extent and range of their artistic