‘A gallery in the mind’? William Hazlitt, Edmund Spenser and the Old Masters

This essay explores the associations made by William Hazlitt between the work of the Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser and paintings by Rubens, Titian and Poussin, revealing how the nineteenth-century critic drew upon Spenser’s writing to conjure the notion of ‘a gallery in the mind’: a virtual collection of pictures encountered through words that served the new public for temporary exhibitions of Old Master paintings.