Piozzi

A 1789 example in some travel writing by Hester Lynch Piozzi gives a sense of trumpery’s non-value: “A heap of trumpery fit to furnish out the shop of a Westminster pawnbroker.”

Hester Piozzi, one of the most influential literary women of the late 18th Century, petitioned the king to allow her husband's nephew to adopt her maiden name of Salusbury, and thus continue it to posterity.

Johnson used to talk of this very frankly, and Mrs. Piozzi has preserved his very picturesque description of the scene as it remained upon his fancy.

But it was rather against the third-rate copies of third-rate artists—the “ship-loads of dead Christs, Holy Families and Madonnas”—that his indignation was directed; and in speaking of his attitude with regard to the great masters of art, it is well to remember his words to Mrs Piozzi:—“The connoisseurs and I are at war, you know; and because I hate them, they think I hate Titian—and let them!”

She was first married, in 1763, to Mr. Thrale, member of parliament for Southwark, and after his death, she became the wife of Signor Piozzi, a Florentine.