Sir Joshua Reynolds

English, 1723 - 1792

BiographyEnglish painter. Although his experimental techniques proved to be disastrous, Reynolds, who became the first president of the RA (see under London) in 1768, was the most influential English artist of his day, establishing, in his Discourses (1769–90), the principles of the Grand Manner. He was born in Plympton, Devon, a clergyman's son, and in 1740 was apprenticed to the fashionable London portrait painter Thomas Hudson. From 1744 he practised in London and Devon and in 1749 met Augustus Keppel with whom he sailed to Minorca, en route for Italy. Most of his Italian stay was spent in Rome, studying Antique sculpture and old and modern masters which provided him with inspiration and prototypes for the rest of his career. By 1753 he was in London where his portrait of Keppel (1752; London, National Maritime Mus.) established his reputation. Keppel was the first of a series of portraits of military men, endowed with heroic qualities, culminating in the dynamic Colonel Tarleton (1782; London, NG). By 1760 he was sufficiently prosperous, through unremitting work and shrewd self-advancement, to move to a splendid house in Leicester Fields where he entertained a distinguished circle of friends including Johnson, Goldsmith, and Garrick. Garrick between Tragedy and Comedy (1762; priv. coll.) is an allegorical portrait, a type, possibly adopted from France, which Reynolds usually reserved for female sitters, the most famous being Mrs Siddons as the Tragic Muse (1784; San Marino, Calif., Huntington AG). From 1769, in his RA lectures, he formulated his theory of the Grand Manner. Many of his ideas had been expressed before, but Reynolds was the first to combine them in an elegant synthesis. Simply put, he exhorted artists to learn from past masters (he was unapologetic about his own borrowings) and idealized nature, and to devote themselves to morally elevating subjects. Practising what he preached, he exhibited Count Ugolino and his Children (Knole, Kent) in 1773, but his only commissioned history was The Infant Hercules (1787; St Petersburg, Hermitage) painted for Catherine II of Russia, which was praised by Fuseli and Barry for its sublimity. A more profitable sideline from the 1770s was the painting of fancy pictures, which sometimes, as in Cupid as Link-Boy (1774; Buffalo, Albright-Knox Gal.), exhibit a slightly sinister eroticism.

In 1784, Reynolds suceeded Ramsay as painter to George III but his state portraits of the King and Queen Charlotte (1780; London, RA) are undistinguished. Far better is his informal but swagger George IV with a Servant (1787; Arundel, Sussex) painted for the Prince Regent.

Rodgers, David. "Reynolds, Sir Joshua." In The Oxford Companion to Western Art, edited by Hugh Brigstocke. Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/subscriber/article/opr/t118/e2216 (accessed May 2, 2012).

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