REYNOLDS, Sir Joshua

Joshua Reynolds, the most important painter in England in the eighteenth century, was the first President of the Royal Academy on its foundation in 1768 and was knighted the following year. Utilizing the pictorial teachings of the past, the compositional principles of Baroque art and the colouring of the Venetian painters of the Renaissance, he became the foremost portrait painter of his time. The members of the English aristocracy and the wealthy middle classes who commissioned him usually expected him, as their official painter, to produce dignified and flattering likenesses, and indeed, by lavish use of external trappings and a truly brilliant capacity for selecting the most becoming pose, he was able to do what was required of him. But he could penetrate beneath the elegant surface and had the power to suggest character and individuality without marring the pleasing overall picture.

Plump, serene and ruddy of face, with an evident partiality for good food and drink, there is something reminiscent of Falstaff in the portrait of Admiral Hughes now in Budapest. The fiery garnet tint of the coat and the gold of the braid and the order on the sitter’s breast create a brilliant harmony which marvelously demonstrates the principal virtue of Reynolds’s art: his glowing colour. The picture was painted in 1786 and, according to Reynolds’s notes, became the property of the Imperial Ambassador in 1787. This Imperial Ambassador was none other than Prince Esterh�zy, and the picture was acquired by the Museum as part of the Esterh�zy collection. There is another version in the Painted Hall at Greenwich.

Joshua Reynolds, third son and seventh child of the Reverend Samuel Reynolds, was apprenticed at seventeen in London to the portrait painter Thomas Hudson, a Devonshire man like himself. Despite the uninspired example of Hudson, Reynolds succeeded in his ambition to become no ‘ordinary’ craftsman-painter: he established himself as a fashionable portrait painter, became friends with the most eminent men of letters in England, first president of the newly formed Royal Academy in 1768, and was knighted in 1769. Although he did not achieve greatness as a ‘history painter’, he invested his innumerable portraits of the privileged men and women of English society with the wit, poetic resonance and nobility of heroic narrative. His fifteen Discourses on Art, delivered at the Academy between 1769 and 1790, remain the most cogent and most moving tribute in English to the ideals of Western art grounded in the Italian Renaissance.

We now tend to prefer the fresher brush of his rival Gainsborough to Reynolds’s contrivances. A restless and indiscriminate experimenter with media and pigments, imitating the surface effects of Old Master paintings without an understanding of their methods, he saw his pictures fade, flake and crack, so that portraits ‘died’ before their sitters. Even his contemporaries protested at his technical shortcomings. Yet the more we look at Reynolds, in the prodigious variety which Gainsborough rightly envied, the more we see that he indeed achieved what he defined as ‘that one great idea, which gives to painting its true dignity…of speaking to the heart’. More than any English painter before him, in the ‘great design’ of ‘captivating the imagination’, Reynolds participated in ‘that friendly intercourse which ought to exist among Artists, of receiving from the dead and giving to the living, and perhaps to those who are yet unborn’ (Discourse Twelve).

Captain Robert Orme is one of the great romantic military portraits, painted soon after Reynolds established his London practice. When it was exhibited in 1761 at the Society of Artists, a visitor described it as ‘an officer of the [Coldstream] Guards with a letter in his hand, ready to mount his horse with all that fire mixed with rage that war and the love of his country can give’. The sitter, Robert Orme (1725-90), served in America as aide-de-camp to General Braddock. When Braddock was killed in 1755 in an ambush by the French, Orme returned to England and resigned from the army. Some time in 1756 he sat for Reynolds.

Orme never purchased the portrait from the artist, in whose studio it attracted much notice ‘by its boldness and singularity’. The composition may be freely adapted from drawings of Italian frescoes and Roman sculpture brought back by Reynolds from his journey to Italy in 1750-2; it may also allude to a portrait of Charles I by Van Dyck, now in Paris. But the effect is splendidly dramatic and immediate: the thunderous sky and extravagant lighting, Orme’s windswept hair, the highlighted despatches in his hand, his foaming steed, the red coat pushed open by the ready sword - all suggest a heroic and transient moment in the life of the young officer.

Reynolds was the first president of the Royal Academy and the author of 15 discourses on painting, which are classics of the theory of art. In this dismounted equestrian portrait, Reynolds presents Colonel Coussmaker in a pose of casual but studied negligence, the line of his body repeated in the curving neck of the horse. The summer before Reynolds painted the portrait, he traveled to Holland and Flanders and profited by his observation of Rubens’s works, especially in the creation of a free and painterly surface treatment.

Commodore Keppel was one of fifteen children of the second Earl of Albemarle. After a circumnavigation of the world in 1740, Keppel had a meteoric career in the Royal Navy. As early as 1749, he was promoted to commodore. He invited the young Reynolds to accompany him to the Mediterranean, as a result of which the painter had the opportunity to visit Italy. This study trip was a milestone for Reynolds. The life-size portrait was his thank- you gift to Keppel after their return in 1752. The two remained friends for life.

X-ray pictures show that Reynolds experimented with Keppel’s pose, and changed it, but from the outset, there must have been the idea to quote the famous Belvedere Apollo. Keppel’s striding posture resembles the classical statue, but is reproduced frontally. The borrowed pose bears the thought of the idealization of the individual.

The painting shows the supple painting technique of the early works, carefully executed with soft brushes. Keppel is standing on a small strip of shoreline in front of a steep cliff-face. The dramatic scene relates to an event in 1747, when Keppel, following a shipwreck off the coast of Brittany - hinted at in the background - was arrested and court-martialled. The scenery with the storm, the wild surf, the rocky coast and the flickering lightning is in accordance with the aesthetic of the sublime, and enhances the heroic character of the naval officer, who, unimpressed by the forces of nature, poses for the painter. The pose and the landscape idealize the sitter.

The episode depicted, narrated by Livy and Valerius Maximus, tells of how after the taking of Carthage in 209 BC Scipio had treated with respect a beautiful virgin, one of the hostages who had been consigned to him, and had sent her back to her intended husband and parents with the sole recommendation that her suitor strived for peace between Rome and Carthage.

Reynolds reproduced his earlier work A Nymph and Cupid (Tate Gallery, London) in this commission for Lord Carysfort. The title change is evidence that both paintings are variations on a mythological theme. (Zone is an old-fashioned word for girdle.) The model for the nymph-like Venus was likely the celebrated Emma hart, who was later the wife of Sir William Hamilton (the British ambassador to Naples) and mistress of Admiral Lord Nelson.

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Francesco Gasparini: The Meddlesome Cupid, aria

The portrait was painted for Frederick, Duke of York, at whose sale it was acquired by George IV for £72 9s. According to the artist’s pocket-book, the work was begun in June-July 1789. It was still in progress in September when a newspaper report commented on 26 September 1789: ‘Lord Rawdon’s head is done - and, what is extraordinary with Sir Joshua, in two sittings. The figure, drapery, and landscape are sketched out, and in their first colour - so may be safely as well as easily finished.’ A record of payment exists dated May 1790, when the portrait was exhibited at the Royal Academy. An engraving was issued in 1792. Evidence of changes made by Reynolds can be seen in the outline of the hat and the arrangement of the curtain wrapped around the tree, while the initial painting of the sky can be detected beneath the trees in the middle distance and in the far landscape.

Reynolds had the keenest intelligence of any painter working in eighteenth-century Britain. His appointment as the first President of the Royal Academy in 1768 was as much a reflection of his intellectual powers as of his abilities as an artist, as indicated by the Discourses on Art addressed to the students of the Academy between 1769 and 1790. In addition, a considerable amount is known of his working practices over the years owing to the survival of many of his pocket-books, quite apart from knowledge of his personality and conversation as recorded in James Boswell’s Life of Johnson (1791). Yet, with all those advantages, Reynolds failed to please George III and Queen Charlotte. Although he was granted the position of Principal Painter to the King in 1784 in succession to Allan Ramsay, it was said that ‘The King and Queen could not endure the presence of him; he was poison to their sight.’

This portrait of the Marquess of Hastings (1754-1826) dates from near the end of the artist’s life when his eyesight (like his hearing) had begun to fail. Indeed, a note in his pocket-book of 13 July 1789 records that his eye ‘began to be obscured’, and it seems likely that this portrait was one of the last he painted with a sitter in front of him. Yet, Reynolds, in spite of such difficulties, created with seeming ease an heroic image. The tall figure posed against a tree is framed by the swirling smoke of battle echoed by the twisted curtain. His sword and hat are silhouetted against the background. The stance, with the right leg thrust forward and the hand raised to the chin as though in conversation, suggests a certain confidence in the face of danger. The figure is alert but dignified.

The Marquess of Hastings is shown wearing the undress uniform of a Colonel and ADC to George III, the rank he held from 1782 until 1793. He was a soldier and statesman close to both the Prince of Wales and the Duke of York. His military service was undertaken in America during the War of Independence, in Brittany and the Netherlands. Appointed Master of Ordnance (1806-7), he was also made Governor of Bengal from 1813 to 1822 and Governor of Malta in 1824. He died at sea. Reynolds’s portrait of George IV when Prince of Wales with a Page (now at Arundel Castle, Sussex) was presented to the Marquess of Hastings by the Prince of Wales as a mark of friendship in 1810.

The sitter of the painting was the general of the British Legion who fought in the American War of Independence.

Prosperity permeates this group portrait by Reynolds. Lord George Clive was cousin of Robert Clive, founder of the empire of British India, and made his fortune at that land. Most beautifully painted is the centrally placed Indian nurse, who, kneeling, supports the little girl in Indian courtly attire. Clearly the painter found the Indian’s depiction his greatest pleasure.

In his seventh Discourse on Art delivered at the Royal Academy in 1776, Reynolds proclaimed:

He…who in his practice of portrait-painting wishes to dignify his subject, which we will suppose to be a lady, will not paint her in the modern dress, the familiarity of which alone is sufficient to destroy all dignity… [he] dresses his figure something with the general air of the antique for the sake of dignity, and preserves something of the modern for the sake of likeness.

In his fourth Discourse of 1771 he had recommended the ‘historical Painter’ never to to ‘debase his conceptions with minute attention to the discriminations of Drapery…With him, the clothing is neither woolen, nor linen, nor silk, satin, or velvet: it is drapery; it is nothing more.’

Reynolds was not alone in worrying about the way portraits began to look ridiculous as fashions changed. The dress of ancient Greeks and Romans belonged to that period in European history which, educated people then thought, set civilised standards for all time; it was also believed to be closer to nature than modern dress especially the ‘straight lacing of English ladies’, ‘destructive…to health and long life’. But not all sitters wished to be depicted in mythical charades, and the results could sometimes be even more risible than an outmoded bodice - as when Lady Sarah Bunbury, who ‘liked eating beefsteaks and playing cricket’ was painted by Reynolds sacrificing to the Three Graces.

Lady Cockburn’s portrait demonstrates the half-way mode most successfully adopted by the artist, and his pleasure in it is reflected by his signing it on the hem of her robe - a wonderfully majestic gold ‘drapery’. According to the newly fashionable exaltation of maternity, Augusta Anne, Sir James Cockburn’s second wife, is posed with her three children (although separate sittings are recorded for the elder boys). James, the cherub kneeling on the left, born in 1771, became a general; George, born in 1772 and clambering around his mother’s neck, grew up to be the admiral whose ship conveyed Napoleon to exile on St Helena; the baby, William, born that June, entered the Church and became Dean of York. The commission must have reminded Reynolds of the traditional allegorical image of Charity as a woman with three children; he probably knew Van Dyck’s painting (now in the National Gallery, but then in an English private collection) or the famous engraving after it, for his composition resembles it in many details.

Where Van Dyck’s Charity gazes up to Heaven, however, Lady Cockburn turns her profile to us and looks lovingly at her eldest son. Despite George’s mischievous address to the viewer - probably to be imagined as his Papa - the composition echoes Michelangelo’s grand and severe sibyls on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. The colour accent of the brilliant macaw, a favourite pet in Reynolds’s household recorded as having perched on the hand of Dr Johnson, was an afterthought, recalling Rubens’s use of a similar device. So well did Reynolds succeed in lending Lady Cockbum ‘the general air of the antique’, however, that when the painting was etched for publication, and Sir James objected to his wife’s name being exposed in public, the print was entitled Cornelia and her Children after the Roman matron who boasted that her children were her only jewels.

English portrait painting after 1750 moved in the direction of naturalness. Sir Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough - exact contemporaries - were the two greatest English portrait painters of the eighteenth century, but their pictures were of quite different types. Reynolds was a temperamental painter who loved to yield to the excitement of actual painting. For all that, he was acutely concerned over all questions of technique, and throughout his life he studied the pictures of the masters, especially of Rembrandt and Rubens, in an effort to penetrate their secret. In the Baroque manner he painted his figures in the action and attitude best fitted to the sitter’s character. When his sitters were women, he approached the sensuousness of Rubens.

The portrait of Lady Sunderlin is the archetypal Grand Manner British portrait. She stands larger than life and very tall, seen against a Rubensian landscape.

In 1788, when Reynolds was at the summit of his reputation, he painted this portrait for one of his aunts, Anna Maria Lady Jones. The sitter was Francis George Hare, the nephew or adopted son of Lady Jones.

Two years after it was painted this picture was already famous. It was bought by Baron Alphonse de Rothschild in 1872 and bequeathed to the Louvre in 1906.

As a portraitist and art-theoretician, Joshua Reynolds was the leading head of the Royal Academy of Arts in London. As its first president since its foundation in 1768, he was knighted in 1769. Sir Joshua tirelessly promoted a higher status for the portrait as a genre to compete with history painting. His total of fifteen Discourses on Art began in 1769 as addresses delivered at the Academy’s award ceremonies and continued until 1790.

As early as 1779 the first eight Discourses appeared in book form, and made art a topic of public discussion. The portrait was, for Reynolds, the expression of the “grand style” when it was based on artistic exemplars. The depiction of the person should, he said, be subordinated to a “general idea”, and the “effect” too should be of “general” validity. For Reynolds, a favoured compositional means was the borrowing of figural motifs from the store of classical and modern art. The “borrowed attitudes” were intended to ennoble the sitter and distinguish the artist as a master who had studied the great works of the past and reinterpreted their inventions.

Tendencies to use the mobile brushwork of Baroque painting for narrative purpose were apparent in England. Reynolds put the sublimity of Antiquity into portraiture in an early stage. Sophia Heywood, or Mrs. Musters (1758-1819), was then renowned for her beauty, and she is depicted as Hebe, that is the handmaid of the gods, filling the bowl for Jupiter. Both her pose and the proportions recall Guido Reni’s Aurora, while the colours are reminiscent of Guercino.

With a hefty dose of sarcasm, Sir Joshua Reynolds painted a fantastical School of Athens. The painting portrays real and picturesque figures, all of whom English gentlemen who instead of being shown in a sumptuous representation, as in the case of Raphael’s School of Athens, are very ill-mannered fellows. One is even lying on the ground, modelled after Raphael’s Diogenes, and, naturally, there are dogs. This coterie includes other figures who are laughing and making faces. The setting has a Gothic air and the palette is very dark. This was an exceptionally critical and grotesque representation of these circles that toured Italy, which Reynolds parodied heavily.

Andrew Stuart of Torrence and Castlemilk (1725-1801) was an eminent lawyer. In 1770 he was appointed Keeper of the Signet of Scotland.

The canvas is held in a carved Chippendale style giltwood frame.

Dr. John Thomas (1712-1793) was consecrated as Bishop of Rochester in 1774. He is portrayed wearing the robes of the Dean of the Most Honourable Order of the Bath. In the background the Westminster Abbey can be seen.

The costume, collar and possibly the painted niche may be later additions to this painting.

It is thought that the sitter of this portrait, depicted bust-length, with pearl earrings, is an as yet unidentified member of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s family. The painting is unfinished, the roughly finished head stands in sharp contrast to the unfinished drapery and incomplete background.

By the 1740s, Reynolds preferred to paint directly onto the canvas with no preliminary drawing, a methodology he applied throughout his career. When completing portraits, Reynolds tended to work on the head of the sitter present, whilst the costume and other details were completed later on.

Reynolds was his country’s premier portraitist. In this self-portrait the dramatic swath of light, rich colour, and Old Masterly stance are typical of his style. The paper he holds reads “Disegni del Divino Michelagnolo Bon…” (Drawings by the Divine Michelangelo Buon…).

Reynolds’s little portrait sketches were done for himself, or to please a favourite. This sketch of Kitty Fisher, the popular actress, shows the sitter seated, like Danaë.

This portrait, as is typical with Reynolds, imbues the sitter with great distinction, achieved through the sumptuous clothes and the expression and pose of the sitter. The exaggerated whiteness of the skin is emphasized by the white ermine and the blood red velvet of the dress. Following the fashion of the time, the cheeks are rouged.

Reynolds never tired of encouraging his students at the Royal Academy to bear in mind how important it was to study the contents and techniques of the old masters and, by copying them, to develop a style they could use. Though Reynolds himself was a highly distinctive painter, he mastered “a-la-mode” painting and could effortlessly slip into the guise of another style.

Here in his portrait of The Infant Samuel, the stylistic guise he dons is that of Rembrandt. In earthy shades of brown, he shows Samuel, the last judge and first prophet of Israel, as a child. The very choice of theme is unusual, considering the role of Samuel as the epitome of constant obedience, great wisdom and just but firm rule, a weighty role indeed for a child of such tender age, as Reynolds shows here. By using the light and colours of Rembrandt, he also cites the profound human piety of the Dutch artist’s oeuvre. In this way, the Rembrandtesque becomes a motif of dignity that not only enriches the painting and lends it profound significance, but also mediates between the religious Old Testament theme and the innocence of the child.