Joshua Reynolds

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(b Plympton, Devon, 16 July 1723; d London, 23 Feb 1792). English painter, collector and writer. The foremost portrait painter in England in the 18th century, he transformed early Georgian portraiture by greatly enlarging its range. His poses, frequently based on the Old Masters or antique sculpture, were intended to invoke classical values and to enhance the dignity of his sitters. His rich colour, strong lighting and free handling of paint greatly influenced the generation of Thomas Lawrence and Henry Raeburn. His history and fancy pictures explored dramatic and emotional themes that became increasingly popular with both artists and collectors in the Romantic period. As first president of the Royal Academy in London, he did more than anyone to raise the status of art and artists in Britain. His Discourses on Art, delivered to the students and members of the Academy between 1769 and 1790, are the most eloquent and widely respected body of art criticism by any English writer.

See the Abbreviations for further details.

Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792), the outstanding intellectual force among English artists of his age, vir tually created a new type of portraiture by interpreting the humanity of his sitters in terms of the heroic tradition of Old Master history painting.

Joshua Reynolds was born on July 16, 1723, at Plympton, Devon, the third son and seventh child of the Reverend Samuel Reynolds, master of the Plympton Grammar School and sometime fellow of Balliol College, Oxford. Joshua was enabled by education, ability, and inclination to move all his adult life with ease and distinction in literary and learned circles. A vocation for art was confirmed by reading as a boy Jonathan Richardson's Essay on the Theory of Painting (1715), with its program for restoring portraiture to the dignity of high art, and at the age of 17 Joshua was apprenticed to Richardson's son-in-law, Thomas Hudson, in London.

Reynolds set up on his own in 1743 and practiced in Plympton and London. His work of this period shows the influence of Anthony Van Dyck and the innovations introduced by William Hogarth, then at the height of his powers.

In 1749 Reynolds sailed for Italy as the guest of Commodore Augustus Keppel. In Rome, Reynolds studied the Old Masters with a single-mindedness unmatched by any earlier English painter. His only diversion was a small number of caricature paintings in the manner of his fellow Devonian Thomas Patch. Raphael was Reynolds's hero, but on his way back to England he visited northern Italy and came under the spell of the Venetian painters and Correggio.

Reynolds settled in London in 1753 and established his reputation as the foremost portrait painter with Captain the Hon. Augustus Keppel (1753-1754), the first of a long series of portraits ennobled by a borrowed pose, here taken from the Apollo Belvedere. He used borrowed attitudes in two ways: as a mode of elevation and as a species of wit. As Horace Walpole noted, both usages are controlled by intellect and taste, manifested in the aptness of his application to the sitter's character, achievement, or role in society.

After his election as foundation president of the Royal Academy in 1768 until his death in London on Feb. 23, 1792, Reynolds's life was too closely intertwined with the artistic, literary, and social history of his time for a summary to be adequate. A small group of portraits of men of genius with whom he was intimate, headed by Dr. Johnson, is unique in European art in that each is accompanied by a written character sketch which is a masterpiece of psychological assessment.

Reynolds delivered 15 discourses to the members and students of the Royal Academy between 1769 and 1790. They upheld the ideal theory in art and constituted the classic formulation of academic doctrine after more than 2 centuries of debate.

Reynolds's main types of portraiture commemorate naval and military heroes, civil and ecclesiastical dignitaries, the English landowning oligarchy in both its public and private aspects, actors and actresses, and children in fanciful roles, related in their vein of sentiment to "fancy pictures" like the Age of Innocence (1788). His most ambitious translation of a subject picture into a portrait is the group of the daughters of Sir William Montgomery, the Graces Adorning a Term of Hymen (1774), a Miltonian bridal masque in which the rite of worship to the God of Wedlock is performed by three famous beauties, one recently married, another preparing for marriage, and the third still to be betrothed. Among the finest of his heroicized military portraits in a battle setting are Colonel Banastre Tarleton (1782) and George Augustus Eliott, Lord Heathfield (1788).

A visit to Flanders and Holland in 1781 renewed Reynolds's enthusiasm for Peter Paul Rubens and was followed by a decade of prodigious creative energy. To this final phase belong most of Reynolds's history paintings, including those commissioned for John Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery and the Infant Hercules (1788), commissioned by the Empress of Russia. Sarah Siddons as the Tragic Muse (1784) shows the actress flanked by emblems of Open and Secret Murder and assembles motives borrowed from Michelangelo, with whose name he closed his last discourse.

As the foundation president of the Royal Academy, Reynolds guided its destinies in its momentous first phase, devoting his immense influence to the single goal of forming a national school of history painters choosing their exalted themes not only from the Bible and classical antiquity but also from Shakespeare and the national past. Courteous, affable, and open to new ideas, he steered a liberal and tactful course and stamped a character of devotion to high art on the institution that lasted into the age of J. M. W. Turner and even beyond.

Further Reading

The definitive edition of Reynold's Discourses on Art was edited by Robert R. Wark (1959). Frederick Whiley Hilles edited Letters of Sir Joshua Reynolds (1929) and Reynolds's Portraits
(1952), which contains written character sketches of Oliver Goldsmith, Samuel Johnson, David Garrick, and others. The monumental study of Charles Robert Leslie and Tom Taylor, Life and Times of Sir Joshua Reynolds (2 vols., 1865), should be supplemented by Frederick Whiley Hilles, The Literary Career of Sir Joshua Reynolds (1936). See also Derek Hudson, Sir Joshua Reynolds: A Personal Study (1958). The best-illustrated and most critical study of Reynolds's art is Ellis K. Waterhouse, Reynolds (1941).

Additional Sources

Steegman, John, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Folcroft, Pa.: Folcroft Library Editions, 1977; Norwood, Pa.: Norwood Editions, 1978.

Reynolds, Sir Joshua (1723-92). Portrait painter, born in Devon to a scholarly and clerical family. Educated at his father's school, Reynolds showed early skill in drawing and portraiture and by 1743 was in practice on his own. Almost every person of note in the second half of the 18th cent. had their portrait painted by Reynolds. In 1764 he formed the Club, whose members included Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke, Oliver Goldsmith, and Adam Smith. In 1768, on the founding of the Royal Academy, Reynolds was the obvious choice for president. Between 1769 and 1790 he wrote and delivered an influential series of Discourses on art.

Reynolds, Joshua (1723–1792), English portrait painter and theorist. Sir Joshua Reynolds's critical role in the development of British art from the eighteenth century lay both in his painting practice and his position as the first president of the Royal Academy. As the leading painter of aristocratic and intellectual society in the second half of the eighteenth century, Reynolds looked to classical and Old Master models to endow his "great style" portraits and his own reputation with art historical seriousness. He articulated his method for raising the social status of the artist in theoretical form with the fifteen lectures (known as the Discourses on Art) he delivered between 1769 and 1790 to the students and members of the Royal Academy that he helped found in 1768.

Born in Plympton, where his father, an Oxford fellow, was master of the local grammar school, Reynolds began his London career as an apprentice to fellow Devonshire-born portrait painter Thomas Hudson in 1740. After three years (although he had been indentured for four), Reynolds began his independent practice in London and Devonshire. To complete his artistic education, he sailed with his friend Commodore Augustus Keppel to Italy, where he studied in Rome between April 1750 and April 1752.

On his return to London at the end of 1752, Reynolds set up his studio near Covent Garden, the neighborhood then popular with artists. His second portrait of Keppel (c. 1753–1754; National Maritime Museum, London) in the pose of the Greek sculpture Apollo Belvedere demonstrates Reynolds's study of the antique statues in Rome, as well as the heroic figures of Michelangelo. As his future student James Northcote related, Reynolds's success was consolidated with his commissions of "several ladies of high quality, whose portraits the polite world flocked to see." Reynolds's hectic schedule of sittings (in 1758 he had sittings every day of the week) provided the income necessary for his move to a larger house in Leicester Fields in 1760.

That year also marked the initial exhibition of the Society of Artists, which was the first public exhibition of paintings to be held in England. Reynolds contributed four portraits, including the classicizing full-length portrait of Elizabeth Gunning, duchess of Hamilton (1758–1759; Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight). Reynolds continued to exhibit at the Society of Artists; however, he socialized with men of letters, such as Samuel Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith, and Edmund Burke, and was a founding member of the Literary Club in 1764.

Soon after his two-month trip to Paris, the Royal Academy was founded, in December 1768, and Reynolds was elected its first president. It was for the academy rooms that he painted his only portraits of King George III and Queen Charlotte. Although he never succeeded in winning royal patronage, Reynolds was knighted in April 1769 and named principal painter in 1784 on the death of Allan Ramsay.

The following two decades of Reynolds's career revolved around his dual role as painter and theoretician at the Royal Academy. At the annual exhibitions, Reynolds displayed his most ambitious works, such as Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse (1783–1784; Huntington Library Art Collections, San Marino, Calif.), in which the dramatic actress is seated in the pose of Michelangelo's prophet Isaiah from the Sistine Chapel ceiling.

Presented annually for the first five years and then every other year at the academy's annual awards ceremony, Reynolds's Discourses on Art were not only a prescriptive course of study for aspiring artists, but also presented the president's case for the intellectual status of the artist in society. In his stated theory of beauty in Discourse IX, Reynolds's emphasis on the cerebral is clear: "The beauty of which we are in quest is general and intellectual; it is an idea that subsists only in the mind."

Although Reynolds's dictate to artists urging inventiveness may seem at odds with his own borrowing of poses from antique sculpture and Old Master paintings, his allusions to great works from the past are in keeping with the theory he outlines in Discourse XII: "The daily food and nourishment of the mind of an Artist is found in the great works of his predecessors. There is no other way to become great himself." To this end, Reynolds recommends the "great style" of the Roman and Bolognese schools, as opposed to the "ornamental" approach of the Venetians.

Reynolds's own attempts to achieve the richness of color of Titian and the Venetian school led him to experiment with mixtures of varnish, turpentine, bitumen, and other unconventional ingredients that often caused irreparable damage to his paintings. To Northcote he confessed that "I had not an opportunity of being early initiated in the principles of Colouring." Reynolds stopped painting upon the deterioration of his eyesight in 1789. On his death in 1792, he was buried in the crypt of St. Paul's Cathedral. In his eulogy, Edmund Burke took up Reynolds's own insistence on the intellectual role of the artist, noting that "he was a profound and penetrating philosopher."

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Northcote, James. Memoirs of Sir Joshua Reynolds: Comprising Original Anecdotes of Many Distinguished Persons, His Contemporaries, and a Brief Analysis of His Discourses. London, 1813.

Reynolds, Sir Joshua. Discourses on Art. Edited by Robert R. Wark. New Haven and London, 1975.

——. The Letters of Sir Joshua Reynolds. Edited by John Ingamells and John Edgcumbe. New Haven and London, 2000.

Secondary Sources

Mannings, David. Sir Joshua Reynolds. A Complete Catalogue of His Paintings. New Haven and London, 2000.

Penny, Nicholas, ed. Reynolds. London, 1986.

—ELIZABETH A. PERGAM

Quotes:

"Nothing can be made of nothing; he who has laid up no material can produce no combination."

"Invention strictly speaking, is little more than a new combination of those images which have been previously gathered and deposited in the memory; nothing can come from nothing."

"The real character of a man is found out by his amusements."

"If you have great talents, industry will improve them: if you have but moderate abilities, industry will supply their deficiency."

Sir Joshua Reynolds
Self-portrait
Birth name	Joshua Reynolds
Born	16 July 1723(1723-07-16)
Died	23 February 1792 (aged 68)
Nationality	English

Sir Joshua Reynolds RA FRS FRSA (16 July 1723 – 23 February 1792) was an important and influential 18th century English painter, specialising in portraits and promoting the "Grand Style" in painting which depended on idealisation of the imperfect. He was one of the founders and first President of the Royal Academy. George III appreciated his merits and knighted him in 1769.

Contents 1 Biography 2 Status and reputation 3 Character sketch 4 See also 5 References 6 External links 6.1 Paintings 6.2 Writings

Biography

Reynolds was born in Plympton, Devon, on 16 July 1723. As one of eleven children, and the son of the village school-master, Reynolds was restricted to a formal education provided by his father. He exhibited a natural curiosity and, as a boy, came under the influence of Zachariah Mudge, whose Platonistic philosophy stayed with him all his life.

Showing an early interest in art, Reynolds was apprenticed in 1740 to the fashionable portrait painter Thomas Hudson, with whom he remained until 1743. From 1749 to 1752, he spent over two years in Italy, where he studied the Old Masters and acquired a taste for the "Grand Style". Unfortunately, whilst in Rome, Reynolds suffered a severe cold which left him partially deaf and, as a result, he began to carry a small ear trumpet with which he is often pictured. From 1753 until the end of his life he lived in London, his talents gaining recognition soon after his arrival in France.

Reynolds worked long hours in his studio, rarely taking a holiday. He was both gregarious and keenly intellectual, with a great number of friends from London's intelligentsia, numbered amongst whom were Dr Samuel Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith, Edmund Burke, Giuseppe Baretti, Henry Thrale, David Garrick and fellow artist Angelica Kauffmann. Because of his popularity as a portrait painter, Reynolds enjoyed constant interaction with the wealthy and famous men and women of the day, and it was he who first brought together the famous figures of "The" Club. By 1761 Reynolds could command a fee of 80 Guineas for a full-length portrait (Mr Fane); in 1764 he was paid 100 Guineas for a portrait of Lord Burghersh.^[1]

With his rival Thomas Gainsborough, Reynolds was the dominant English portraitist of 'the Age of Johnson'. It is said that in his long life he painted as many as three thousand portraits. In 1789 he lost the sight of his left eye, which finally forced him into retirement. In 1791 James Boswell dedicated his Life of Samuel Johnson to Reynolds.

Reynolds died on 23 February 1792 in his house in Leicester Fields in London. He was buried at St. Paul's Cathedral.

Status and reputation

Professionally, Reynolds' career never peaked. He was one of the earliest members of the Royal Society of Arts, helped found the Society of Artists, and, with Gainsborough, established the Royal Academy of Arts as a spin-off organisation. In 1768 he was made the RA's first President, a position he held until his death. As a lecturer, Reynolds' Discourses on Art (delivered between 1769 and 1790) are remembered for their sensitivity and perception. In one of these lectures he was of the opinion that "invention, strictly speaking, is little more than a new combination of those images which have been previously gathered and deposited in the memory."

Reynolds and the Royal Academy have historically received a mixed reception. Critics include many of the Pre-Raphaelites, and William Blake, the latter having published his vitriolic Annotations to Sir Joshua Reynolds' Discourses in 1808. To the contrary, both J. M. W. Turner and James Northcote were fervent acolytes: Turner requested he be laid to rest at Reynolds' side, and Northcote (who lived for four years as Reynolds' pupil) wrote to his family "I know him thoroughly, and all his faults, I am sure, and yet almost worship him." The word worship is second cast; originally Northcote had written adore.

Character sketch

In appearance Reynolds was not at all striking. Slight of frame, he was just about 5'6" with dark brown curls, a florid complexion and features which James Boswell thought were "rather too largely and strongly limned." He had a broad face, a cleft chin, and the bridge of his nose was slightly dented; his skin was scarred by smallpox, and his upper lip disfigured as a result of falling from a horse as a young man. Nonetheless he was not considered ugly, and Edmond Malone asserted that "his appearance at first sight impressed the spectator with the idea of a well-born and well-bred English gentleman."

Renowned for his placidity, Reynolds often claimed that he "hated nobody". Never quite losing his Devonshire accent, he was not only an amiable and original conversationalist but a friendly and generous host, so that Fanny Burney recorded in her diary that he had "a suavity of disposition that set everybody at their ease in his society", and William Makepeace Thackeray believed "of all the polite men of that age, Joshua Reynolds was the finest gentleman." Dr. Johnson commented on the inoffensiveness of his nature; Edmund Burke noted his "strong turn for humor". Thomas Bernard, who later became Bishop of Killaloe, wrote in his verses on Reynolds:

"Dear knight of Plympton, teach me how
To suffer, with unruffled brow
And smile serene, like thine,
The jest uncouth or truth severe;
To such I'll turn my deafest ear
And calmly drink my wine.

Thou say'st not only skill is gained
But genius too may be attained
By studious imitation;
Thy temper mild, thy genius fine
I'll copy till I make them mine
By constant application."

Admittedly, some did construe Reynolds' equable calm as cool and unfeeling. Hester Lynch Piozzi's pen-portrait reads:

"Of Reynolds what good shall be said?- or what harm?
His temper too frigid; his pencil too warm;
A rage for sublimity ill understood,
To seek still for the great, by forsaking the good..."

It is to this luke-warm temperament that Frederick W. Hilles, Bodman Professor of English Literature at Yale attributes the fact Reynolds never married. In the editorial notes of his compendium Portraits by Sir Joshua Reynolds, Hilles theorizes that "as a corollary one might say that he [Reynolds] was somewhat lacking in a capacity for love", and cites Boswell's notary papers: "He said the reason he would never marry was that every woman whom he liked had grown indifferent to him, and he had been glad he did not marry her." Reynolds' own sister, Frances, who lived with him as housekeeper, took her own negative opinion further still, thinking him "a gloomy tyrant". Strangely, it was this very presence of family that compensated Reynolds for the absence of a wife; He wrote on one occasion to his friend Bennet Langton, that both his sister and niece were away from home "so that I am quite a bachelor." Biographer Ian McIntyre discusses the possibility of Reynolds having enjoyed sexual rendezvous with certain clients, such as Nelly O'Brien (or "My Lady O'Brien", as he playfully dubbed her) and Kitty Fisher, who visited his house for more sittings than were strictly necessary. Claims to this end are, however, purely speculative.

"Robert Clive and his family with an Indian maid", painted 1765.

Colonel Acland and Lord Sydney, The Archers, 1769. In September 2005, the Tate Gallery acquired the painting for over UK£2.5 million (US$4.4 million).

Charles Lennox, 3rd Duke of Richmond painted 1758

Court offices
Preceded by Allan Ramsay	Principal Painter in Ordinary to the King 1784–1792	Succeeded by Sir Thomas Lawrence
Cultural offices
Preceded by —	President of the Royal Academy 1768–1792	Succeeded by Benjamin West

See also

• English school of painting
• Martin Postle, an expert on Joshua Reynolds
• Mary Nesbitt, eighteenth century courtesan who began her career as Reynolds model.

References

1. ^ The Times Sale Of The Vaile And Other Pictures 25 May 1903

• Postle, Martin: Joshua Reynolds: The Creation of Celebrity, Tate, 2005, ISBN 1854375644
• Postle, Martin: Sir Joshua Reynolds: The Subject Pictures
• Postle, Martin: Drawings of Joshua Reynolds

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Joshua Reynolds

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Joshua Reynolds

• Joshua Reynolds at Find a Grave
• Works in the National Galleries of Scotland
• www.abcgallery.com/R/reynolds/reynolds.htmlOlga's Gallery
• http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/online/featuredartists/reynolds/
• http://www.classicartrepro.com/artistsb.iml?artist=262
• www.gac.culture.gov.uk/search/Artist.asp?maker_id=112498
• Port Eliot House, home of the Earl of St. Germans contains many fine works by Reynolds, including a rare view of Plymouth.
• 'Sir Joshua Reynolds: The Acquisition of Genius' exhibition at Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery - 21 November 2009 to 20 February 2010

Paintings

• Artcyclopedia: Sir Joshua Reynolds
• National Portrait Gallery Collection
• Twelve Joshua Reynolds portraits in Henry Thrale's library.
• Sir Joshua Reynolds at Olga's Gallery
• Sir Joshua Reynolds, A Complete Catalogue of His Paintings (book-bound)

Writings

• By Sir Joshua Reynolds
  • The Letters of Sir Joshua Reynolds
  • Seven Discourses on Art at Project Gutenberg
  • Portraits by Sir Joshua Reynolds (character sketches)
• Biographies
  • The Life Of Sir Joshua Reynolds: Late President Of The Royal Academy, volumes 1 and 2, by Reynolds' Friend James Northcote
  • Memoirs of Sir Joshua Reynolds, by Reynolds' friend Farington Joseph Staff
  • Sir Joshua Reynolds: The Painter in Society, by Richard Wendorf (winner of the Annibel Jenkins Prize for Biography)
  • Sir Joshua Reynolds, by Estelle M. Hurll, from Project Gutenberg

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