William Hazlitt’s Account of ‘Mr Angerstein’s Collection of Pictures’

Abstract

Hazlitt’s account of the Angerstein Collection was published anonymously in 1822, two years before Lord Liverpool purchased thirty-eight pictures from it to form the nucleus of the National Gallery. This paper considers Hazlitt’s essay within the wider context of writing about art collections in the early nineteenth century, which was then a new and developing field, and compares it with other publications on Angerstein’s pictures to highlight the distinctive qualities of Hazlitt’s art criticism.