Dilettante Society

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The Dilettante Society or Dilettanti was a society of noblemen and gentlemen which sponsored the study of ancient Greek art and the creation of new work in the style. It was founded as a London dining club in 1734 by a group of people who had been on the Grand Tour.

The group, initially led by Francis Dashwood, contained several dukes and was later joined by Joshua Reynolds, David Garrick, Uvedale Price and Richard Payne, among others.

The club quickly became wealthy and influential, through a system in which members had to pay it 4% of their income in any year in which they received certain forms of windfall, such as a marriage.

The group aimed to correct and purify the public taste of the country; from the 1740s, it began to support Italian opera, and from the 1750s, it was the prime mover in establishing the Royal Academy. It also funded scholarships for youths to go on the Grand Tour, or for archaeological expeditions such as that of Richard Chandler, William Pars and Nicholas Revett, the results of which they published in Ionian Antiquities, a major influence on neo-Classicism in Britain.

Notable Members

References

This article incorporates text from the public domain 1907 edition of The Nuttall Encyclopaedia.

The Penguin Dictionary of British and Irish History, ed. Juliet Gardiner

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