It is very well known that prior to the eighteenth century the art-buying Englishman's interest in history paintings paled in comparison with his seemingly inexhaustible appetite for portraiture. Iain Pears's statement certainly holds true that the general impression among the English was that the only good history paintings were made by foreigners. Late seventeenth-century sources, among others, William Aglionby's Painting Illustrated in Three Diallogues (1685), corroborate Pears's observation. Some modern scholars hold a lowly opinion of Aglionby's book, dismissing it as a mere plagiaristic recycling of Charles Alphonse Dufresnoy's (1611–1668) important art-theoretical text, De arte graphica (1668). Nevertheless, as Craig Ashley Hanson has convincingly demonstrated, far from simply presenting plagiarized material to his audience, Aglionby reshaped his source of inspiration toward the innovative goal – innovative, that is, for the time and place in which he was writing – of promoting history painting in England. In essence, by acknowledging the need to encourage the development of an English school of history painting, he provided his well-heeled readers with a practical manual concerning how to appreciate such work in an effort to convince them to become true collectors and patrons of this genre.

An interesting passage in Aglionby's preface is worth quoting, because it sums up the situation in late seventeenth-century England vis-à-vis history painting:

In essence, Aglionby reflects upon the disheartening state of affairs with respect to fine-art production in England: the best English painters are portraitists while history painting itself, though principally collected by members of the aristocracy, is not practiced by native artists. Yet by the time that Schalcken arrived in London in the spring of 1692, change was already afoot. For new developments, both literary and pictorial, helped sow the seeds of what would ultimately lead to shifting tastes during the eighteenth century proper.