Joshua Reynolds

English painter and writer

• Born: July 16, 1723
• Birthplace: Plympton, Devonshire, England
• Died: February 23, 1792
• Place of death: London, England

Founder of the English School of painting, Reynolds served for more than two decades as the first president of the Royal Academy of Arts. His Discourses express the fundamental tenets of neoclassical art, while his paintings anticipated the Romantic movement.

Early Life

Joshua Reynolds’s father, Samuel Reynolds, was a clergyman and headmaster of the local school, where Reynolds received his only formal education. Like his father, his mother, the former Theophila Potter, came from a family of university-trained clerics, but young Reynolds showed little interest in study: One of his surviving Latin exercises is more remarkable for its doodles than its prose.

Even as a child Reynolds showed artistic ability. A sketch of Plympton School impressed his father, and in the family library Reynolds pored over such works as Charles-Alphonse Dufresnoy’s De arte graphica as translated by John Dryden (1695) and Jonathan Richardson’s The Theory of Painting (1715). He also copied engravings accompanying texts such as Plutarch’s Lives. At the age of twelve, Reynolds produced his first portrait, that of the Reverend Thomas Smart. Consequently, when he was seventeen he was apprenticed to Thomas Hudson, a Devonshire native who had gone to London and become England’s leading portrait painter.

Reynolds remained with Hudson approximately three years (1740-1743). He then returned home, and for the next six years he traveled between London, Plymouth, and Plymouth Dock, painting portraits of the local gentry.

Life’s Work

Despite his youth and a relatively brief apprenticeship, Joshua Reynolds demonstrated remarkable technical ability, as exemplified by the fancy-dress portrait of Captain John Hamilton (1746). Late in life, Reynolds remarked on how little progress he had made in the decades since he had painted that piece. In this early period one can detect, too, some of the lifelong influences on Reynolds. His self-portrait dating from about 1746 is reminiscent of Rembrandt, as is a posthumous portrait of his father from the same time. The influence of Sir Anthony Van Dyck is apparent in The Eliot Family(c. 1746), that of Titian in First Lieutenant Paul Henry Ourry (c. 1747). Already, then, Reynolds was beginning to make English art international rather than insular by adopting Flemish chiaroscuro and Venetian coloring.

In 1749, Richard, First Baron Edgcumbe, provided a major stimulus to this tendency. Edgcumbe had been an early patron to Reynolds and had sat for his portrait. Now he introduced Reynolds to Commodore Augustus Keppel, who had stopped in Plymouth on his way to the Mediterranean. Keppel offered to take Reynolds with him, thereby giving the painter a chance to study at firsthand the works of the Italian masters. Keppel’s ship, the Centurion, left England in May and reached Minorca on August 23, 1749. For the rest of the year, Reynolds toured the island and painted the members of the British garrison. Early the next year he moved on to Italy, where he remained until the middle of 1752.

While there he undertook some caricatures, but chiefly he studied and sketched the masters. In essence, Reynolds was completing his apprenticeship; by the time he returned to England, in October, 1752, he had become a more accomplished artist who was soon able to outdistance all rivals. The sojourn on the Continent marked his physiognomy as well as his work. On Minorca, a fall from a horse permanently injured his upper lip, and a cold he caught while devoting three months to sketching the works of Raphael in the unheated Sistine Chapel left him deaf. For the rest of his life, he carried a large hearing trumpet, evident in a 1775 self-portrait. Less apparent in this and other pictures that Reynolds painted of himself are his florid complexion and his relatively short stature, somewhat under five feet, six inches in height.

Having set up his studio at 104 St. Martin’s Lane, London (in 1753), Reynolds was once more aided by Keppel. To thank the commodore for his kindness, Reynolds painted a full-length portrait of him. Reynolds worked diligently on the piece, redoing the head after it was nearly finished and altering the hands and clothing. Everywhere in this work Reynolds’s trip to Italy is evident: The pose derives from the Apollo Belvedere, the lighting from Tintoretto. Yet the picture also reveals Reynolds’s confidence in his ability to break with tradition. The background, a storm-tossed ocean bearing the wreckage of a ship, anticipates the Romantic fascination with the power of nature. Instead of emphasizing the blue naval coat, Reynolds relies on green-gray, an uncommon color for this kind of picture, and he takes liberties with Keppel’s outfit, which suggests the gentleman more than the sailor. Most significant, Reynolds here introduces a new kind of portraiture. For the eighteenth century, the highest form of painting was historical because it was most “general and intellectual,” the qualities Reynolds stressed in his ninth Discourse (1780). Portraits, and to an even greater extent landscapes, were less highly regarded because they treated the specific person or place. Reynolds’s portrait of Keppel seeks to elevate this genre to the historical. The picture itself alludes to a historical event, the wreck of Keppel’s ship, the Maidstone, in 1747. Beyond this specific episode, though, is the generalized attitude of command and dignity, of calm in the face of danger. Reynolds thus paints the idea as well as the individual.

Before presenting the painting to Keppel, Reynolds exhibited it for a time in his studio to show prospective sitters what he could achieve. It is not clear whether viewers at the time recognized the traditional references or the revolutionary concept of the picture, but it is clear that they were impressed. In 1755, he had 120 sitters; three years later, he had 150, even though his prices were the highest in London. The strength of his reputation is evident from an anecdote concerning his portrait of Jane Bowles (c. 1775). When her parents wanted her picture, they resolved to ask George Romney because Reynolds’s work had a reputation for fading. Sir George Beaumont changed their minds, telling them, “No matter… ; even a faded picture from Reynolds will be the finest thing you can have.” The painting has cracked and faded in the more than two centuries since it was executed, but its overall condition remains good.

That some of Reynolds’s pictures have not fared so well is the result of his experimentation. M. Kirby Talley, Jr., has said that Reynolds was more innovative in his techniques than even Leonardo da Vinci, whose experiments also were not always successful. Fascinated by the glowing colors of the Venetian masters, Reynolds sought through various means to duplicate their effects. He was so captivated by technique that he would sometimes rub a picture back to the bare canvas to determine what the artist had done. An example of his experimentation is a portrait of Mrs. Kirkman done in 1772. The piece was waxed, egged, and varnished, then painted, each successive layer applied before the previous one could dry. The original luster must have been impressive, but, not surprisingly, the painting has cracked. Reynolds tried various vegetable pigments, some of which have faded with time, and he used Venetian turpentine and asphaltum that made for rich tones but had unfortunate long-term consequences. Sir Walter Blackett, who was painted by Reynolds in the 1760’s and lived to see his portrait fade away, quipped,

Painting of old was surely well designedTo keep the features of the dead in mind,But this great rascal has reversed the plan,And made his picture die before the man.

As Beaumont’s recommendation indicates, though, sitters were undeterred. By 1760, Reynolds was earning between œ6,000 and œ10,000 a year and was busy seven days a week, eight hours a day. Between 1753 and 1760, he painted three members of the royal family—the duke of Cumberland and Prince Edward in 1758 and the prince of Wales in 1759—one dozen dukes, and numerous members of the gentry. His paintings thus provide a record of upper-class England in the mid-eighteenth century. In 1760, Reynolds bought the house at 47 Leicester Fields (later Leicester Square) for œ1,650 and made an additional œ1,500 of improvements, including the construction of a large octagonal studio.

This was also the year of the first London exhibit by British artists. Over the next decade, various societies sought to provide more publicity for native talent; their efforts culminated in the establishment of the Royal Academy on December 10, 1768. Although Reynolds was friendly with both Whigs and Tories—Samuel Johnson once complained to him, “You hate no one living”—he was more closely identified with the former party. Hence, in 1762, King George III named Alan Ramsay as his Painter in Ordinary (a post that Reynolds received in 1784, after Ramsay’s death). The king could not, however, overlook England’s greatest painter in choosing the first president of the academy. On December 14, 1768, Reynolds was chosen for this post, and on April 21, 1769, he was knighted as a consequence of that election.

Already he had begun to paint fewer portraits than he had earlier in his career; now he reduced the number from about 150 a year to about 50. In part the decline resulted from his presidential duties, which included delivering an address on the anniversary of the Royal Academy’s establishment. Those speeches, which were presented annually until 1772 and biennially thereafter, allowed Reynolds to express his artistic theories. Published under the title Discourses, they repeatedly elicited the highest praise. The Gentleman’s Magazine for April, 1772, called the fifth Discourse “the best work upon the practice and theory of painting that has yet appeared in the world.” Writer Hannah More described the sixth Discourse (1774) as “a masterpiece for matter as well as style,” and the bishop of London pronounced the last one (1790) “the work of a Great Master, whose name will be as much and as justly revered by this country, as that of Michael Angelo is by his.” The fifteen discourses not only offered advice to the academy’s students but also articulated the principles of neoclassicism. Thus, in the seventh Discourse (1776), Reynolds criticized “exact representations of individual objects with all their imperfections” and urged instead the portrayal of “general ideas.” In the thirteenth Discourse (1786), he states, “Reason… must ultimately determine every thing” and goes on to say that the aim of art is not to record what is but “to supplythe natural imperfection of things.”

Another distraction for Reynolds was his socializing. In Samuel Johnson’s terms, Reynolds was a clubbable man. In 1764, he founded The Club, in part to give Johnson a forum for his conversation, in part to provide himself with literary discussions that he regarded as essential for the artist. He was to credit Johnson’s talk with having “formed my mind and… brushed off from it a deal of rubbish.” This club met on Mondays; during the rest of the week, Reynolds made the rounds of the Thursday Night Club, the Shilling Rubber Club (for whist, a card game), the Devonshire Club, and the Society of the Dilettanti (which met for Sunday dinner). In addition, he frequently attended and gave private parties.

The paintings that he did produce after 1768 remain of high quality and reveal his psychological penetration as well as his technical virtuosity. Some of his best paintings are of his literary friends, such as the five portraits of Johnson that alternately reflect Johnson’s social side and his introspective nature. He could be equally discerning of those whom he knew less well, too. Lady Worsley (c. 1776) suggests a boldness and sensuality that led to uncontested charges of adultery a few years after she sat for her picture.

From about the same time as Lady Worsley is his monumental The Marlborough Family, applying the grand style of historical painting to a family group. The work is full of studied allusions, such as the comic mask held by one of the children and probably borrowed from a work by Nicolas Poussin. Yet it is original in its groupings, so that eight people and three dogs fit nicely onto the canvas, and the formality of the adult world contrasts with the playfulness of the children.

In 1781, Reynolds went to the Netherlands to examine Flemish paintings, and he made a second trip there four years later. The pictures from this decade show a new vitality. The prince of Wales’s portrait depicts him preparing to mount his gray stallion and ride into battle (1784); Lieutenant-Colonel Bannistre Tarleton adjusts his uniform as a battle rages behind him (c. 1782). There is an informality about Colonel George Coussmaker (c. 1782), with the subject’s crossed legs in front of a delicately sketched tree, that is lacking in earlier works. Paintings such as Miss Gideon and Her Brother, William (c. 1786), Master Hare (1788), and Penelope Boothby (1788) move away from the bright colors of the Venetian school to emphasize contrasts of light and dark. The delicate brushstrokes suggest Peter Paul Rubens, the shadows, Rembrandt; the play of light and dark reminds the viewer of Reynolds’s younger contemporary Francisco de Goya.

On July 13, 1789, Reynolds abruptly ceased painting, “prevented by my eye beginning to be obscured,” he wrote. By the end of the year, he was blind in one eye. His formerly complacent personality suffered as a result. When the academy rejected Reynolds’s candidate, Giuseppe Bonomi, for the post of professor of perspective, Reynolds temporarily resigned. Although this quarrel was resolved, others ensued. Nothing, however, could obscure Reynolds’s achievements, recorded in some four thousand paintings.

After his death from liver cancer on February 23, 1792, he lay in state at Somerset House, the home of the Royal Academy. His pallbearers included three dukes and two earls; his casket was followed to St. Paul’s Cathedral by ninety-one coaches. Reynolds was buried in the crypt near Sir Christopher Wren. England’s greatest portrait painter thus lies beside England’s greatest architect.

Significance

When Joshua Reynolds was considering his life’s work, he debated between becoming an apothecary and a painter. In many ways, the former seemed the better choice in 1740. William Hogarth had claimed that England could not hope to compete with the Continent in the field of artistic achievement, and he went on to say that the prospects for portrait painters were bleak: “the majority… must either shift how they can among their acquaintances, or live by travelling from town to town like gipsies.” There was no school of English art; the country’s greatest painters had all come from the Continent: Hans Holbein in the sixteenth century and Sir Anthony Van Dyck, Sir Peter Lely, and Sir Godfrey Kneller in the seventeenth. Nor was there a national academy to train and exhibit English talent.

Reynolds changed all that. When he traveled, he did so as a gentleman, riding in his own gilded coach, and he amply demonstrated that English art could rival, even surpass, the work being done elsewhere in Europe. Symbolic of this changed state of affairs was Reynolds’s election to the Academy of Florence in 1775. Ten years later, Catherine the Great asked Reynolds for a historical picture, trusting every detail, including size and subject, to him. Under his direction the Royal Academy gained a reputation that no other artist in England could have given it, and the exhibitions there equaled the salons being held during the same period in Paris.

Much of Reynolds’s work consciously relies on the European tradition. Sketches that he made during his visit to Italy find their way into such pieces as Elizabeth Anne Linley Sheridan in the guise of St. Cecilia (1775). Master Crewe as Henry VIII (1776) is a mock-heroic rendition of Holbein’s famous picture of the Tudor monarch. Mrs. Lloyd (1776) takes its pose from Raphael’s Adam Tempted;Sarah Siddons as the muse of Tragedy is also Siddons as Michelangelo’s Isaiah in the Sistine Chapel. Similarly, Reynolds’s Discourses cling to the traditional. On the title page of the 1798 edition of Reynolds’s Works, William Blake, the arch-Romantic, wrote, “This man was hired to Deprave Art.”

Yet, as the eminent Victorian art and cultural critic John Ruskin noted, Reynolds “exhorted his pupils to attend only to the invariable, while he himself was occupied in distinguishing every variation of womanly temper.” Reynolds provided a record of eighteenth century aristocracy, but he also painted a beggar who made cabbage nets for a living (The Schoolboy, 1777). Within a single year, 1764, he painted England’s two archbishops and the country’s two leading courtesans. As Thomas Gainsborough declared, “How various the fellow is.”

Despite his devotion to neoclassical modes and doctrines, he looked ahead in some ways to the Romantic revolution to follow. His men are heroic, his women refined, but his children are children, not small adults. He drew his subjects not only from Greek and Roman mythology but also from Dante and Shakespeare. Such sources would be commonplace in the next century but were unusual at the time—the first complete translation of The Divine Comedy into English did not appear until 1802. Reynolds was devoted to color, and Ruskin ranked him with Titian and Joseph Turner as a great colorist. At the same time, his use of light and shadow is impressive, and a late picture such as Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, with Her Daughter, Lady Georgiana Cavendish (1784) is largely a study of white on white.

In his fourteenth Discourse (1788), devoted to the recently deceased Gainsborough, Reynolds observed,

If ever this nation should produce genius sufficient to acquire to us the honourable distinction of an English school, the name of Gainsborough will be transmitted to posterity, in the history of the art among the very first of that rising name.

As Reynolds knew well, the speaker of those words might with greater justice have substituted his own name for that of his distinguished rival.

Bibliography

Hilles, Frederick Whiley. The Literary Career of Sir Joshua Reynolds. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1936. Concentrates on Reynolds’s other career, that of a writer. Reveals much about his friendships with those of literary London and the sources of his ideas.

Hudson, Derek. Sir Joshua Reynolds: A Personal Study. London: G. Bles, 1958. A sympathetic treatment of a person who rarely evoked sympathy, even from his friends. Concentrates on Reynolds’s personal relationships but also offers a good general introduction to his art.

Leslie, Charles Robert, and Tom Taylor. Life and Times of Sir Joshua Reynolds. London: John Murray, 1865. Despite its age, this two-volume work remains the most detailed biography of Reynolds. It includes much original material drawn from the artist and his contemporaries.

McIntyre, Ian. Joshua Reynolds: The Life and Times of the First President of the Royal Academy. London: Allen Lane, 2003. A comprehensive biography, with a discussion of Reynolds’s involvement with the Royal Academy, his rivalry with Gainsborough, his life in Rome, and his activities as an art collector and dealer. McIntyre analyzes Reynolds’s subject paintings and sexual “fancy paintings” in addition to his portraits.

Mayoux, Jean Jacques. English Painting. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1975. A survey of a century of British art from the mid-1700’s to the mid-1800’s. Includes a good, though sometimes harsh, discussion of Reynolds and his influence.

Penny, Nicholas, ed. Reynolds. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1986. A catalog of an exhibition of Reynolds’s works. In addition to the marvelous reproductions, many of them in color, the volume includes important essays on Reynolds’s life and work.

Redgrave, Richard, and Samuel Redgrave. A Century of British Painters. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981. Covers the same period as Mayoux’s book, but treats Reynolds more kindly. Offers a fine discussion of Reynolds’s technique.

Reynolds, Sir Joshua. The Letters of Sir Joshua Reynolds. Edited by John Ingamells and John Edgcumbe. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000. The first collection of Reynolds’s letters to be published since 1929, this updated collection features additional letters, for a total of 308. Reynolds wrote these letters—which contain detailed notes to help readers understand their contents—to friends, family, and patrons.

Waterhouse, Ellis. Reynolds. New York: Phaidon, 1973. Another good source for reproductions (139, with 16 in color). Includes an elegant essay on the artist and his art and a useful bibliography.

Wendorf, Richard. Sir Joshua Reynolds: The Painter in Society. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996. Wendorf contends that Reynolds became the most famous painter of his time not only because he was talented and lucky but also because he knew how to please his clients. Wendorf situates Reynolds’s art within the context of eighteenth century British society.