11
11
0
On July 16, 1723, Sir Joshua Reynolds, English portrait painter (Simplicity), was born in Plympton, Devon, England (d. 1792). From the article:
Sir Joshua Reynolds
1723 - 1792
"Reynolds was the leading English portraitist of the 18th century. Through study of ancient and Italian Renaissance art, and of the work of Rembrandt, Rubens and Van Dyck, he brought great variety and dignity to British portraiture.
Reynolds was born at Plympton in Devon, the son of a headmaster and fellow of Balliol College, Oxford: a more educated background than that of most painters. He was apprenticed in 1740 to the fashionable London portraitist Thomas Hudson, who also trained Wright of Derby. He spent 1749-52 abroad, mainly in Italy, and set up practice in London shortly after his return.
He soon established himself as the leading portrait painter, though he was never popular with George III. He was a key figure in the intellectual life of London, and a friend of Dr Johnson. When the Royal Academy was founded in 1768, Reynolds was elected its first President. Although believing that history painting was the noblest work of the painter, he had little opportunity to practise it, and his greatest works are his portraits.
His paintings are not perfectly preserved due to faulty technique. The carmine reds have faded, leaving flesh-tones paler than intended, and the bitumen used in the blacks has tended to crack."
Sir Joshua Reynolds
1723 - 1792
"Reynolds was the leading English portraitist of the 18th century. Through study of ancient and Italian Renaissance art, and of the work of Rembrandt, Rubens and Van Dyck, he brought great variety and dignity to British portraiture.
Reynolds was born at Plympton in Devon, the son of a headmaster and fellow of Balliol College, Oxford: a more educated background than that of most painters. He was apprenticed in 1740 to the fashionable London portraitist Thomas Hudson, who also trained Wright of Derby. He spent 1749-52 abroad, mainly in Italy, and set up practice in London shortly after his return.
He soon established himself as the leading portrait painter, though he was never popular with George III. He was a key figure in the intellectual life of London, and a friend of Dr Johnson. When the Royal Academy was founded in 1768, Reynolds was elected its first President. Although believing that history painting was the noblest work of the painter, he had little opportunity to practise it, and his greatest works are his portraits.
His paintings are not perfectly preserved due to faulty technique. The carmine reds have faded, leaving flesh-tones paler than intended, and the bitumen used in the blacks has tended to crack."
sir-joshua-reynolds
Posted from nationalgallery.org.uk
World History
Painting
Art
Museums
Posted >1 y ago
Responses: 6
4
4
0
Sir Joshua Reynolds: A collection of 434 paintings (HD)
Sir Joshua Reynolds: A collection of 434 paintings (HD) Description: "As one of the most renowned portraitists of the 18th century, Sir Joshua Reynolds contr...
Thank you my friend SGT (Join to see) for making us aware that July 16 is the anniversary of the birth of 18th century English portrait painter Sir Joshua Reynolds.
His portraits evoke the 18th century style of dress and lifestyle. Cultural anthropologists and art historians as well as those who appreciate classical art can benefit from viewing his paintings IMHO.
Image: The Portrait of Omai by Joshua Reynolds is moved into place for Tate Britain's exhibition. Photograph: Matthew Fearn/PA
Background from theguardian.com/culture/2005/may/21/1
"How the mighty fall
Why has the reputation of Joshua Reynolds, regarded as a genius in his own day, fallen so precipitously? Maybe, Jonathan Jones argues, because we no longer have the taste for the imperial grandeur he gives the society figures who people his paintings
You can find monuments to him everywhere you look in London. In Leicester Square, where he lived, cinema-goers walk past the worn bust of what looks, with its floppy hat, like a Victorian music hall singer but is in fact Sir Joshua Reynolds, 18th-century portrait painter and first president of the Royal Academy of Arts. The figure, at the north-west corner of the gardens in the square, was carved in 1874 by Henry Weekes; it looks across at the site of Reynolds's house, today a wine bar.
Walk west from here, and you come to Burlington House, where the Royal Academy moved in the high Victorian age, a century after George III founded it. Here is Alfred Drury's perky 1930s statue of Sir Joshua, palette in hand and manner breezily conversational. The richest Reynolds walk, though, is eastward from Leicester Square into the heart of Hanoverian London, past the blue plaque on the Photographers' Gallery that marks another of his homes, popping into Somerset House where the Royal Academy exhibitions were staged in the late 18th century, taking in the copy of Reynolds's bespectacled self-portrait in the house of his friend Samuel Johnson, off Fleet Street, finishing at the supreme monument of the scientific revolution - the mathematically domed St Paul's.
Under the cupola of Wren's great temple, there are four statues, four heroes of good sense and human sympathy and whatever else it was that defined the admirable in 18th-century Britain. Sir Joshua Reynolds is one of them. His statue was carved by the ambitious neoclassicist John Flaxman, who dressed him in the robes of a doctor oflaw, with his hand resting over a relief portrait of Michelangelo. Reynolds is as cool and authoritative as a Roman senator.
To his east stands Dr Johnson, author of the dictionary and hero of his own life as written by James Boswell. To Johnson's south is John Howard, prison reformer. There is one more. The fourth corner under the dome is occupied by Sir William Jones, and it was paid for, says the plinth, by the East India Company in honour of his work as a judge in Bengal. To the lexicographer, the artist, and the reformer, we can add the colonial administrator.
The pantheon under the dome of St Paul's is a self-portrait of British culture two centuries ago. Recent histories of the period have emphasised the intellectual liveliness and clubbable characters of the "English Enlightenment", but here there's a sense of Augustan severity. John Howard may be remembered in the name of the Howard League, but you need to skim quite a few volumes on imperial history before you track down "Oriental" Jones. The great lexicographer, of course, is as fat in fame as ever, though more for his piquant remarks to Boswell than for his own writings. But none has fallen quite so far as Sir Joshua Reynolds.
It's not that Sir Joshua is unknown. We've all heard of him. But can you name one of his pictures - still less point to a favourite? Today Reynolds is a name, or a weather-beaten marble face. Once he meant so much. When he died in 1792 at the age of 69, aristocrats and artists, writers and politicians mourned him sincerely, deeply, and in the high classical style he had made his own. The Irish parliamentarian and political thinker Edmund Burke recognised in him a fellow intellect: "To be such a painter, he was a profound and penetrating philosopher."
Two decades later, in 1813, an ambitious Reynolds exhibition was staged in London. The young painter John Constable managed to get an invitation to the opening dinner, where he gawped at the Prince Regent and Lord Byron. Flaxman's statue, soon to be installed in St Paul's, had place of honour over the diners. Constable wrote to his fiancee Maria Bicknell telling her about the splendid evening and urging her "to see these charming works frequently; and form, in your own mind, the idea of what painting should be from them. It is certainly the finest feeling of art that ever existed."
Forty years after Reynolds's death, Constable painted one of the most emotionally charged tributes ever paid to one artist by another. In The Cenotaph To Reynolds' Memory, Coleorton, he was surely mourning more than Sir Joshua (by this time Maria herself was dead) but, however complex, Constable's grief is transfiguring. At the end of an avenue in an autumnal English park, under brown vaults of dying trees, stands a square stone monument. To its sides are busts on pedestals, representing not garden gods but deities of art - Michelangelo and Raphael. Constable's patron Sir George Beaumont, who raised this monument to Reynolds on his Leicestershire estate, commissioned Wordsworth to write the verses inscribed on the cenotaph: " ... Admiring, loving, and with grief and pride/Feeling what England lost when Reynolds died."
Wordsworth remembers him as a national hero like Nelson or the similarly martyred General Wolfe, and Constable's painting, in the depth of its lamentation, like tears on a freshly dug grave, mourns England itself. It is moving; it is overpowering. And in the room in the National Gallery where this painting hangs, among such supreme masterpieces of British oil painting as Turner's Fighting Temeraire and Stubbs's Whistlejacket, you can turn from Constable's pain to study its subject ... and be baffled.
Joshua Reynolds's portraits in this room are not bad - in fact they have a kind of perfection - but no one's eyes can stay long on the pinched figure of Anne, Countess of Albemarle, working with her shuttle in the shadows, when underneath her hangs Thomas Gainsborough's sensual Sarah Siddons. As for Reynolds's Lady Cockburn And Her Three Eldest Sons, this is an elegant historical document of Enlightened attitudes. Lady Cockburn is a bountiful loving mother, her children playful scamps - and even Reynolds's pet macaw gets into the picture, introduced for balance, but adding just a hint of the exotic, and of empire. Reynolds loves children, is interested in animals, gives everyone a lofty classical setting. But emotion? We can barely feel impressed, let alone torn up as Constable was, thinking about Reynolds.
The trouble is that the same 18th-century people who appear in Reynolds are so much sexier when they are painted by Gainsborough, the 18th-century world Reynolds reports on so much more vivid in the art of Hogarth or Joseph Wright of Derby.
The curious, inventive culture of Georgian Britain has become a source of fascination for the 21st century in books and exhibitions. Reynolds, however, stands apart from this. He is somehow invisible. I used to think this was because his art had been overrated in its time - overrated by admirers as sensitive as the poet Oliver Goldsmith, who dedicated The Deserted Village to Reynolds, or the architect Sir John Soane, who kept Flaxman's model for his statue in his cluttered dreamworld of a house at Lincoln's Inn Fields. Do we have better taste than them?
Now I have come to think that what turns us away from Reynolds is not that he portrayed Britain badly but too well - perhaps we shun him as an ugly man avoids mirrors. We like to look at Stubbs, Wright and Hogarth because they show us a past that was scientific, modernising, creative; Reynolds shows us something else. He portrays a British history we are less eager to own up to. He portrays the rulers of an empire.
Understanding Reynolds begins under the dome of St Paul's, and the clue is the company he keeps. The statue of Sir William Jones raised by the East India Company is a kind of double of Reynolds. Jones (1746-94), as well as being a judge, was first president of the Asiatick Society of Bengal. He and Reynolds were both intellectuals, presidents of learned societies typical of the Enlightenment. And both of them tell us something about Britain that we would rather forget.
Reynolds painted men better than women, powerful men even better, and bastards best of all. His portrait of one of the biggest and most stylish bastards of the century hangs in the National Gallery. Banastre Tarleton, a cavalry commander in the American War of Independence, is a name Britain has forgotten (though he crops up in Mel Gibson's film The Patriot, a monstrous British officer who tortures and murders for fun). When he visited Reynolds's studio in 1782, he'd had his successes but had also made a disastrous tactical blunder that contributed to a British defeat. He was in serious need of reinvention; and so, more seriously, was Britannia.
Just a quarter of a century after James Thomson wrote his song rejoicing in her rule over the waves, the Atlantic empire had fallen apart. It was a moment of crisis and anxiety that even split the companionable world of conversation that Reynolds inhabited. His friend, Samuel Johnson, was a Tory and, according to Boswell, regularly "attacked the Americans with intemperate violence of abuse". Reynolds, like his other dear friends Edmund Burke and the playwright and MP Richard Brinsley Sheridan, was a Whig, and the Whigs were sympathetic to the American revolution. When he portrayed Tarleton, however, Reynolds portrayed the best, not the worst, in his subject: Tarleton is young and fresh-faced as he stands amid the gunsmoke in front of a cannon, and Reynolds sensitively lets you see his disabling wound - two fingers are missing from his right hand. He is a noble figure; Reynolds based the soldier's pose on a classical statue of the Roman military hero Cincinnatus.
Quotation from classical art is not just a tic in Reynolds's portraits - it is a philosophy. When George III founded the Royal Academy in 1768, there could really be only one choice for its president, even though the king didn't like the Whiggish Reynolds. And Reynolds's most lasting contribution to British art was not, in the end, his paintings - it was the series of lectures he gave to graduating students of the Royal Academy's school.
Reynolds's Discourses On Art are definitive expressions of neoclassicism. The 15th-century Renaissance revived the art of ancient Greece and Rome but had only the roughest idea of the difference between them. The 18th century isolated the moment of classical perfection, in Athens in the 5th century BC.
Reynolds's ideal was Phidias, the ancient Greek sculptor credited with the design of the Parthenon and its frieze, the supreme aesthetic achievement of the ancient world. (These were the "marbles" that Lord Elgin brought to Britain so controversially at the beginning of the 19th century.) Phidias portrayed not the changing visible trappings of nature, the disfigured mess of the way things look (Reynolds looks down his nose at people who do, such as Hogarth) but something underneath the surface - "Ideal Nature", the divine form of perfection. Reynolds urged the modern artist to do the same.
This was not so easy in 18th-century Britain. This was an affluent, socially mobile consumer society, delighting in every imported treat from calicoes to tea, and obsessed with fashion. In his discourses, Reynolds acknowledges the problem. Phidias, he says, could make people look noble and timeless because he portrayed them naked - not an option in Reynolds's day. "Art is not yet in so high an estimation with us, as to obtain so great a sacrifice as the ancients made, especially the Grecians; who suffered themselves to be represented naked, whether they were generals, lawgivers, or kings."
It's tempting to compare Reynolds's theory and practice, and conclude that he was simply a hypocrite. He preached a lofty reform of British art, argued that history painting alone, the austere representation of noble or tragic events, was worthy of the highest praise - all the while making a packet painting portraits of anyone who could afford his fees. The truth is stranger. Reynolds did paint histories, such as his scene from Dante of Ugolino and his children being starved to death in a dungeon, but, more successfully, he painted portraits that aspire to the condition of history.
His paintings are the better, the more interesting the subject - or rather, the more Reynolds was able to see this person as participating in the ideal. The most brilliant example of this - unexpectedly in a man who often painted women with a certain powdered dreariness - is his portrait of the courtesan Nelly O'Brien.
Reynolds didn't marry, but he does seem to have had relationships that were more than painterly with various high-class London prostitutes. Nelly O'Brien's portrait in the Wallace Collection takes you by surprise - it looks like an Impressionist painting, a French 19th-century open air portrait, as sunlight hits her bosom and hat while she leans forward in a garden. It might seem the antithesis of Reynolds the neoclassicist; but it is actually a perfect example of the "ideal" discovered beneath the fripperies of nature. She is mapped out like an architectural drawing, her form that of a pyramid - like Poussin, or Cézanne, Reynolds reveals the sphere and the triangle in nature. As serene and organised as an 18th-century cenotaph, this is a monument to beauty.
Reynolds was interested in top people, the best of their kind - the elite. Nelly O'Brien was at the top of her profession. So were the scientist Joseph Banks, the historian Edward Gibbon, the soldier Robert Orme, the novelist Laurence Sterne, the actor David Garrick and the Scottish philosopher Adam Ferguson - all of them portrayed acutely by Reynolds. It's almost as if he collected people, adapting his style just slightly - grave for a man, playful for a child. "Damn him how various he is!" complained his rival Gainsborough.
More brutally, you might say he was a portrait factory, with a repertoire of classical poses and props. These poses and props are what stay with you, more often than not, having a meaning of their own. As they pretend to be the Apollo Belvedere or the Three Graces, Reynolds's people stand or sit in spectacular fictitious settings that weave a peculiarly British fairytale. They are in stately homes of the mind - under lofty pillars, among fine draperies, with a view over rolling parkland. Reynolds gives his people an aristocratic largeness - or, to put it another way, an imperial expansiveness. His portraits seem to have the world at their feet. These are natural rulers.
The classical style is perfect for empires - it worked for ancient Rome, it could work for the British. Reynolds makes this point explicitly in his first address to the Royal Academy in January 1769: Britain is rich and powerful, an empire in the raw; what is wanted now, he says, is the "elegance and refinement" appropriate to its position in the world.
The loss of the American colonies in the 1770s scarcely weakened the empire at all. Instead, Cook's voyages opened up Australia, a whole new continent to add to India and the Caribbean. For sensitive Britons, the problem of empire in the late 18th century was not getting power - that seemed inevitable - but becoming worthy of it: they fretted about the moral character required to govern the world.
Reynolds was a lot more optimistic than Gibbon, whose Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire was published in the 1780s, and who warned of the bleak fate of empires. The implication of Reynolds's discourses and his portraits is that when generals and men of power acquire their ideal form, the corruptions of empire will be smoothed away. Take his painting of Warren Hastings, in the National Portrait Gallery. You'd never guess from Reynolds's cool, elegant portrait of a man whose legs in their stockings taper as perfectly as a Greek statue's slender limbs that this was the same governor-general of Bengal impeached in 1786. The charge sheet was stunning: "He has corrupted his hands and sullied his government with bribes," declaimed Burke in his opening speech to the hearing. "He has used oppression and tyranny in the place of legal government ..." As the trial ground on, Burke's own politics were transformed by what he regarded as the atrocity of the French Revolution - so this passionate Whig is remembered as a conservative.
You don't see that in Reynolds's portrait of Hastings, or in his portrait of Burke. His fault as an artist is, in the end, that he prefers the ideal to the real. Yet his elevated propaganda for the place of art in an empire transformed the place of the painter in British culture: without Reynolds it is impossible to imagine those great Royal Academicians John Constable and JMW Turner. Reynolds placed art at the centre of national political and public life - he argued that beauty was as important as money and guns in Britain's imperial destiny. The painters nourished by the Royal Academy responded to this high task. Constable was a consciously national artist whose "six-footers" aspire to the scale and significance of history painting. Constable's Salisbury Cathedral is a sublime image of Britishness, of nationhood, just as Turner's two canvases of the rise and fall of the Carthaginian empire comment more sceptically on the fate of opulence. William Blake, who loathed Sir Joshua and wrote an acerbic commentary on his discourses, was arguably his greatest student of all - a delineator of ideal forms and cosmic histories.
Reynolds was deeply mourned not so much for his art as for his "feeling of art", as Constable put it. We see this at its most intimate in Reynolds's greatest paintings - the series of self-portraits he painted throughout his life, sensitive and exposed scrutinies that confess to shortsight and to deafness, yet also assert his desire to belong to the same company as his heroes. Painting himself next to a bust of Michelangelo, or wearing spectacles, Reynolds finds his true hero in his own august self
· Joshua Reynolds: The Creation Of Celebrity opens at Tate Britain on May 26."
Sir Joshua Reynolds: A collection of 434 paintings
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lFHjIGlgSA
FYI COL Mikel J. Burroughs LTC Stephen C. Maj William W. "Bill" Price Capt Seid Waddell CW5 (Join to see) SMSgt Minister Gerald A. Thomas SFC Joe S. Davis Jr., MSM, DSL SSgt (Join to see) SP5 Mark Kuzinski SGT John " Mac " McConnell SGT Robert George SP5 Robert Ruck SCPO Morris RamseyCPL Eric Escasio SPC (Join to see) SPC Margaret Higgins Kim Bolen RN CCM ACM SGT Gregory Lawritson
His portraits evoke the 18th century style of dress and lifestyle. Cultural anthropologists and art historians as well as those who appreciate classical art can benefit from viewing his paintings IMHO.
Image: The Portrait of Omai by Joshua Reynolds is moved into place for Tate Britain's exhibition. Photograph: Matthew Fearn/PA
Background from theguardian.com/culture/2005/may/21/1
"How the mighty fall
Why has the reputation of Joshua Reynolds, regarded as a genius in his own day, fallen so precipitously? Maybe, Jonathan Jones argues, because we no longer have the taste for the imperial grandeur he gives the society figures who people his paintings
You can find monuments to him everywhere you look in London. In Leicester Square, where he lived, cinema-goers walk past the worn bust of what looks, with its floppy hat, like a Victorian music hall singer but is in fact Sir Joshua Reynolds, 18th-century portrait painter and first president of the Royal Academy of Arts. The figure, at the north-west corner of the gardens in the square, was carved in 1874 by Henry Weekes; it looks across at the site of Reynolds's house, today a wine bar.
Walk west from here, and you come to Burlington House, where the Royal Academy moved in the high Victorian age, a century after George III founded it. Here is Alfred Drury's perky 1930s statue of Sir Joshua, palette in hand and manner breezily conversational. The richest Reynolds walk, though, is eastward from Leicester Square into the heart of Hanoverian London, past the blue plaque on the Photographers' Gallery that marks another of his homes, popping into Somerset House where the Royal Academy exhibitions were staged in the late 18th century, taking in the copy of Reynolds's bespectacled self-portrait in the house of his friend Samuel Johnson, off Fleet Street, finishing at the supreme monument of the scientific revolution - the mathematically domed St Paul's.
Under the cupola of Wren's great temple, there are four statues, four heroes of good sense and human sympathy and whatever else it was that defined the admirable in 18th-century Britain. Sir Joshua Reynolds is one of them. His statue was carved by the ambitious neoclassicist John Flaxman, who dressed him in the robes of a doctor oflaw, with his hand resting over a relief portrait of Michelangelo. Reynolds is as cool and authoritative as a Roman senator.
To his east stands Dr Johnson, author of the dictionary and hero of his own life as written by James Boswell. To Johnson's south is John Howard, prison reformer. There is one more. The fourth corner under the dome is occupied by Sir William Jones, and it was paid for, says the plinth, by the East India Company in honour of his work as a judge in Bengal. To the lexicographer, the artist, and the reformer, we can add the colonial administrator.
The pantheon under the dome of St Paul's is a self-portrait of British culture two centuries ago. Recent histories of the period have emphasised the intellectual liveliness and clubbable characters of the "English Enlightenment", but here there's a sense of Augustan severity. John Howard may be remembered in the name of the Howard League, but you need to skim quite a few volumes on imperial history before you track down "Oriental" Jones. The great lexicographer, of course, is as fat in fame as ever, though more for his piquant remarks to Boswell than for his own writings. But none has fallen quite so far as Sir Joshua Reynolds.
It's not that Sir Joshua is unknown. We've all heard of him. But can you name one of his pictures - still less point to a favourite? Today Reynolds is a name, or a weather-beaten marble face. Once he meant so much. When he died in 1792 at the age of 69, aristocrats and artists, writers and politicians mourned him sincerely, deeply, and in the high classical style he had made his own. The Irish parliamentarian and political thinker Edmund Burke recognised in him a fellow intellect: "To be such a painter, he was a profound and penetrating philosopher."
Two decades later, in 1813, an ambitious Reynolds exhibition was staged in London. The young painter John Constable managed to get an invitation to the opening dinner, where he gawped at the Prince Regent and Lord Byron. Flaxman's statue, soon to be installed in St Paul's, had place of honour over the diners. Constable wrote to his fiancee Maria Bicknell telling her about the splendid evening and urging her "to see these charming works frequently; and form, in your own mind, the idea of what painting should be from them. It is certainly the finest feeling of art that ever existed."
Forty years after Reynolds's death, Constable painted one of the most emotionally charged tributes ever paid to one artist by another. In The Cenotaph To Reynolds' Memory, Coleorton, he was surely mourning more than Sir Joshua (by this time Maria herself was dead) but, however complex, Constable's grief is transfiguring. At the end of an avenue in an autumnal English park, under brown vaults of dying trees, stands a square stone monument. To its sides are busts on pedestals, representing not garden gods but deities of art - Michelangelo and Raphael. Constable's patron Sir George Beaumont, who raised this monument to Reynolds on his Leicestershire estate, commissioned Wordsworth to write the verses inscribed on the cenotaph: " ... Admiring, loving, and with grief and pride/Feeling what England lost when Reynolds died."
Wordsworth remembers him as a national hero like Nelson or the similarly martyred General Wolfe, and Constable's painting, in the depth of its lamentation, like tears on a freshly dug grave, mourns England itself. It is moving; it is overpowering. And in the room in the National Gallery where this painting hangs, among such supreme masterpieces of British oil painting as Turner's Fighting Temeraire and Stubbs's Whistlejacket, you can turn from Constable's pain to study its subject ... and be baffled.
Joshua Reynolds's portraits in this room are not bad - in fact they have a kind of perfection - but no one's eyes can stay long on the pinched figure of Anne, Countess of Albemarle, working with her shuttle in the shadows, when underneath her hangs Thomas Gainsborough's sensual Sarah Siddons. As for Reynolds's Lady Cockburn And Her Three Eldest Sons, this is an elegant historical document of Enlightened attitudes. Lady Cockburn is a bountiful loving mother, her children playful scamps - and even Reynolds's pet macaw gets into the picture, introduced for balance, but adding just a hint of the exotic, and of empire. Reynolds loves children, is interested in animals, gives everyone a lofty classical setting. But emotion? We can barely feel impressed, let alone torn up as Constable was, thinking about Reynolds.
The trouble is that the same 18th-century people who appear in Reynolds are so much sexier when they are painted by Gainsborough, the 18th-century world Reynolds reports on so much more vivid in the art of Hogarth or Joseph Wright of Derby.
The curious, inventive culture of Georgian Britain has become a source of fascination for the 21st century in books and exhibitions. Reynolds, however, stands apart from this. He is somehow invisible. I used to think this was because his art had been overrated in its time - overrated by admirers as sensitive as the poet Oliver Goldsmith, who dedicated The Deserted Village to Reynolds, or the architect Sir John Soane, who kept Flaxman's model for his statue in his cluttered dreamworld of a house at Lincoln's Inn Fields. Do we have better taste than them?
Now I have come to think that what turns us away from Reynolds is not that he portrayed Britain badly but too well - perhaps we shun him as an ugly man avoids mirrors. We like to look at Stubbs, Wright and Hogarth because they show us a past that was scientific, modernising, creative; Reynolds shows us something else. He portrays a British history we are less eager to own up to. He portrays the rulers of an empire.
Understanding Reynolds begins under the dome of St Paul's, and the clue is the company he keeps. The statue of Sir William Jones raised by the East India Company is a kind of double of Reynolds. Jones (1746-94), as well as being a judge, was first president of the Asiatick Society of Bengal. He and Reynolds were both intellectuals, presidents of learned societies typical of the Enlightenment. And both of them tell us something about Britain that we would rather forget.
Reynolds painted men better than women, powerful men even better, and bastards best of all. His portrait of one of the biggest and most stylish bastards of the century hangs in the National Gallery. Banastre Tarleton, a cavalry commander in the American War of Independence, is a name Britain has forgotten (though he crops up in Mel Gibson's film The Patriot, a monstrous British officer who tortures and murders for fun). When he visited Reynolds's studio in 1782, he'd had his successes but had also made a disastrous tactical blunder that contributed to a British defeat. He was in serious need of reinvention; and so, more seriously, was Britannia.
Just a quarter of a century after James Thomson wrote his song rejoicing in her rule over the waves, the Atlantic empire had fallen apart. It was a moment of crisis and anxiety that even split the companionable world of conversation that Reynolds inhabited. His friend, Samuel Johnson, was a Tory and, according to Boswell, regularly "attacked the Americans with intemperate violence of abuse". Reynolds, like his other dear friends Edmund Burke and the playwright and MP Richard Brinsley Sheridan, was a Whig, and the Whigs were sympathetic to the American revolution. When he portrayed Tarleton, however, Reynolds portrayed the best, not the worst, in his subject: Tarleton is young and fresh-faced as he stands amid the gunsmoke in front of a cannon, and Reynolds sensitively lets you see his disabling wound - two fingers are missing from his right hand. He is a noble figure; Reynolds based the soldier's pose on a classical statue of the Roman military hero Cincinnatus.
Quotation from classical art is not just a tic in Reynolds's portraits - it is a philosophy. When George III founded the Royal Academy in 1768, there could really be only one choice for its president, even though the king didn't like the Whiggish Reynolds. And Reynolds's most lasting contribution to British art was not, in the end, his paintings - it was the series of lectures he gave to graduating students of the Royal Academy's school.
Reynolds's Discourses On Art are definitive expressions of neoclassicism. The 15th-century Renaissance revived the art of ancient Greece and Rome but had only the roughest idea of the difference between them. The 18th century isolated the moment of classical perfection, in Athens in the 5th century BC.
Reynolds's ideal was Phidias, the ancient Greek sculptor credited with the design of the Parthenon and its frieze, the supreme aesthetic achievement of the ancient world. (These were the "marbles" that Lord Elgin brought to Britain so controversially at the beginning of the 19th century.) Phidias portrayed not the changing visible trappings of nature, the disfigured mess of the way things look (Reynolds looks down his nose at people who do, such as Hogarth) but something underneath the surface - "Ideal Nature", the divine form of perfection. Reynolds urged the modern artist to do the same.
This was not so easy in 18th-century Britain. This was an affluent, socially mobile consumer society, delighting in every imported treat from calicoes to tea, and obsessed with fashion. In his discourses, Reynolds acknowledges the problem. Phidias, he says, could make people look noble and timeless because he portrayed them naked - not an option in Reynolds's day. "Art is not yet in so high an estimation with us, as to obtain so great a sacrifice as the ancients made, especially the Grecians; who suffered themselves to be represented naked, whether they were generals, lawgivers, or kings."
It's tempting to compare Reynolds's theory and practice, and conclude that he was simply a hypocrite. He preached a lofty reform of British art, argued that history painting alone, the austere representation of noble or tragic events, was worthy of the highest praise - all the while making a packet painting portraits of anyone who could afford his fees. The truth is stranger. Reynolds did paint histories, such as his scene from Dante of Ugolino and his children being starved to death in a dungeon, but, more successfully, he painted portraits that aspire to the condition of history.
His paintings are the better, the more interesting the subject - or rather, the more Reynolds was able to see this person as participating in the ideal. The most brilliant example of this - unexpectedly in a man who often painted women with a certain powdered dreariness - is his portrait of the courtesan Nelly O'Brien.
Reynolds didn't marry, but he does seem to have had relationships that were more than painterly with various high-class London prostitutes. Nelly O'Brien's portrait in the Wallace Collection takes you by surprise - it looks like an Impressionist painting, a French 19th-century open air portrait, as sunlight hits her bosom and hat while she leans forward in a garden. It might seem the antithesis of Reynolds the neoclassicist; but it is actually a perfect example of the "ideal" discovered beneath the fripperies of nature. She is mapped out like an architectural drawing, her form that of a pyramid - like Poussin, or Cézanne, Reynolds reveals the sphere and the triangle in nature. As serene and organised as an 18th-century cenotaph, this is a monument to beauty.
Reynolds was interested in top people, the best of their kind - the elite. Nelly O'Brien was at the top of her profession. So were the scientist Joseph Banks, the historian Edward Gibbon, the soldier Robert Orme, the novelist Laurence Sterne, the actor David Garrick and the Scottish philosopher Adam Ferguson - all of them portrayed acutely by Reynolds. It's almost as if he collected people, adapting his style just slightly - grave for a man, playful for a child. "Damn him how various he is!" complained his rival Gainsborough.
More brutally, you might say he was a portrait factory, with a repertoire of classical poses and props. These poses and props are what stay with you, more often than not, having a meaning of their own. As they pretend to be the Apollo Belvedere or the Three Graces, Reynolds's people stand or sit in spectacular fictitious settings that weave a peculiarly British fairytale. They are in stately homes of the mind - under lofty pillars, among fine draperies, with a view over rolling parkland. Reynolds gives his people an aristocratic largeness - or, to put it another way, an imperial expansiveness. His portraits seem to have the world at their feet. These are natural rulers.
The classical style is perfect for empires - it worked for ancient Rome, it could work for the British. Reynolds makes this point explicitly in his first address to the Royal Academy in January 1769: Britain is rich and powerful, an empire in the raw; what is wanted now, he says, is the "elegance and refinement" appropriate to its position in the world.
The loss of the American colonies in the 1770s scarcely weakened the empire at all. Instead, Cook's voyages opened up Australia, a whole new continent to add to India and the Caribbean. For sensitive Britons, the problem of empire in the late 18th century was not getting power - that seemed inevitable - but becoming worthy of it: they fretted about the moral character required to govern the world.
Reynolds was a lot more optimistic than Gibbon, whose Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire was published in the 1780s, and who warned of the bleak fate of empires. The implication of Reynolds's discourses and his portraits is that when generals and men of power acquire their ideal form, the corruptions of empire will be smoothed away. Take his painting of Warren Hastings, in the National Portrait Gallery. You'd never guess from Reynolds's cool, elegant portrait of a man whose legs in their stockings taper as perfectly as a Greek statue's slender limbs that this was the same governor-general of Bengal impeached in 1786. The charge sheet was stunning: "He has corrupted his hands and sullied his government with bribes," declaimed Burke in his opening speech to the hearing. "He has used oppression and tyranny in the place of legal government ..." As the trial ground on, Burke's own politics were transformed by what he regarded as the atrocity of the French Revolution - so this passionate Whig is remembered as a conservative.
You don't see that in Reynolds's portrait of Hastings, or in his portrait of Burke. His fault as an artist is, in the end, that he prefers the ideal to the real. Yet his elevated propaganda for the place of art in an empire transformed the place of the painter in British culture: without Reynolds it is impossible to imagine those great Royal Academicians John Constable and JMW Turner. Reynolds placed art at the centre of national political and public life - he argued that beauty was as important as money and guns in Britain's imperial destiny. The painters nourished by the Royal Academy responded to this high task. Constable was a consciously national artist whose "six-footers" aspire to the scale and significance of history painting. Constable's Salisbury Cathedral is a sublime image of Britishness, of nationhood, just as Turner's two canvases of the rise and fall of the Carthaginian empire comment more sceptically on the fate of opulence. William Blake, who loathed Sir Joshua and wrote an acerbic commentary on his discourses, was arguably his greatest student of all - a delineator of ideal forms and cosmic histories.
Reynolds was deeply mourned not so much for his art as for his "feeling of art", as Constable put it. We see this at its most intimate in Reynolds's greatest paintings - the series of self-portraits he painted throughout his life, sensitive and exposed scrutinies that confess to shortsight and to deafness, yet also assert his desire to belong to the same company as his heroes. Painting himself next to a bust of Michelangelo, or wearing spectacles, Reynolds finds his true hero in his own august self
· Joshua Reynolds: The Creation Of Celebrity opens at Tate Britain on May 26."
Sir Joshua Reynolds: A collection of 434 paintings
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lFHjIGlgSA
FYI COL Mikel J. Burroughs LTC Stephen C. Maj William W. "Bill" Price Capt Seid Waddell CW5 (Join to see) SMSgt Minister Gerald A. Thomas SFC Joe S. Davis Jr., MSM, DSL SSgt (Join to see) SP5 Mark Kuzinski SGT John " Mac " McConnell SGT Robert George SP5 Robert Ruck SCPO Morris RamseyCPL Eric Escasio SPC (Join to see) SPC Margaret Higgins Kim Bolen RN CCM ACM SGT Gregory Lawritson
(4)
(0)
4
4
0
Sir Joshua Reynolds RA FRS FRSA (16 July 1723 – 23 February 1792) was an English painter, specialising in portraits. John Russell said he was one of the major European painters of the 18th Century. [1] He promoted the "Grand Style" in painting which depended on idealization of the imperfect. He was a founder and first president of the Royal Academy of Arts, and was knighted by George III in 1769.
(4)
(0)
3
3
0
SGT (Join to see) These painters provide us today a better understanding of life during that period of time.
(3)
(0)
Read This Next
Continue with Facebook 
Continue with Google