Matthew Pilkington

Matthew Pilkington (1701–1774) was the author of a standard text on painters, that would become known as Pilkington's Dictionary.

Biography

Pilkington was born in 1701 at Ballyboy, King's County, Ireland, wrote poetry, studied to be a minister at Trinity College, Dublin, married Laetitia, moved to London, and became associated with Jonathan Swift and Henry Walpole. The fractious relations with Mrs. Pilkington were published. He took an interest in historical painting and published a collection of biographies as The Gentleman's and Connoisseur's Dictionary of Painters.

His work was widely published through many editions, being renamed A Dictionary of Painters in the 1805 and 1810 versions of Henry Fuseli, before becoming commonly known in the nineteenth century as Pilkington's Dictionary. The 1857 edition is available for free download at http://www.ebooksread.com/authors-eng/matthew-pilkington.shtml

Pilkington's contribution to Rapin de Thoyras' Impartial History (1784) has been described as, "an extreme falsification of his life."^[1] He died in 1774 in Dublin.

References

External links

• A dictionary of painters; from the revival of the art to the present period From the Collections at the Library of Congress