Jean-Jacques Rousseau

He contributed to Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie, visited Diderot in prison, but belligerently fell out with them and d’Holbach. He and Voltaire antagonised each other, Voltaire accusing him of using his cleverness “to make us all look stupid.” Casanova visited him on a pretext, making fun of his eccentricity on the way home. Hume invited Rousseau to Britain during his self-imposed exile from Switzerland, but he soon accused Hume of plotting against him. Fuseli admired and met him but eventually broke with his ideas, while Ramsay painted him wearing his favourite fur-trimmed ‘Armenian’ outfit.