Biography Sir Joshua Reynolds

Born 16 July in 1723, Joshua Reynold's family were substantial burghers in the small town of Plympton, in Devonshire, on the southwest coast of England. His father was a clergyman-schoolmaster and other relatives were tradesmen in the town. Joshua was a serious, studious boy, and when he was about 17 his father favored apprenticing him to a local apothecary. Joshua had other ideas. For years he had been drawing, copying prints in his father's library and stydying a book called Essay on the Theory of Painting by the British artist Jonathan Richardson, a work that fired his ambition to become a painter. At the age of 12 he had already painted aportrait of the Reverend Thomas Smart on sailcloth, using shipyard paints.

It was not much of a portrait, but his father agreed that it showed talent. So when it came time to decide whether Joshua was to learn the apothecary's trade or seek a career in art, a well-to-do friend of the family, a Mr. Craunch, was called in to evaluate the boy's efforts and give his opinion. After due consideration Mr. Craunch thought that it might be arranged for one of London's best-known portrait painters, Thomas Hudson, to look at young Joshua's work. If he saw promise in Joshua, perhaps he would take him on as an apprentice; in that event Mr. Craunch agreed to pay for Reynold's upkeep and training. In this way, Joshua Reynolds became a painter. In his own mind he soon saw himself as more than a painter, more even than a great painter. He would dedicate himself to the task of raising the prestige of British painters so that they would be accepted in aristocratic society, as leading men of letters already were. It was a large ambition for a young artist, but he never abandoned the goal, and to a remarkable extent he attained it.

Upon the death of his father in 1746 he set up housekeeping with his two unmarried sisters at Plymouth Dock (now Devonport). For nearly three years Joshua worked doggedly, producing portraits that ranged from poor to good; the best were in no way extraordinary. He painted the local gentry and a good many naval officers, and his pleasant, earnest personality made many friends. Among these early portraits was the portarit of the commodore Honorable Augustus Keppel, which turned out to be the best he had done so far, and the two men became fast friends.

When the squadron was seaworthy again, Keppel invited the artist to sail with him to the Mediterranean. Reynolds left Keppel's ship at the Balearic island of Minorca, then a Bitish stronghold. There he painted enough portraits to finance another step in the career he had planned for himself - a pilgrimage to Italy, the fountainhead of European art. He would study the old masters, especially Raphael. Then he would return to England and convince his countrymen that he could not only paint in the grand Italian manner but that he could do it more successfully than any of his British predecessors. He landed at Leghorn in January 1750 and headed for Rome, where he stayed for two years before visiting Florence, Bologna, Parma and Venice.

In Italy Reynnods did very little painting. He had not come to learn technique, which he felt he already knew. His program was analogous to that of the scholars of his period who read and reread Greek and Latin authors in order to stock their minds with apt quotations from Homer or Virgil. He would cram his mind instead with images from Italy's glorious tradition of art. By spending hours in palaces and religious buildings where classical statues and paintings by the old masters were on display, Reynolds memorized faces, expressions, gestures, the arrangement of points of interest, and the uses of background light and shade to enhance the effect of figures in the foreground.

In 1753 Reynolds was back in London. His first picture to attract public notice was a full-length portrait of his friend Commodore Keppel striding along a storm-lashed shore. It was no accident that the commmodore's pose almost exactly duplicated that of the famous ancient Greek statue, the Apollo Belvedere. Nor was it an accident that the commmodore's pose was almost identical to the one that Allan Ramsay - who was then the leading painter in London and who had also studied in Italy - used earlier for his well-known portrait of the Scottish chieftain Norman MacLeod. By painting a portrait similar to Ramsay's, Reynolds intended to demonstrate that he was the better artist, with a new and more vibrant way of bringing the grand Italian styles to British portraiture.

He succeeded exactly as he had planned. Augustus, Viscount Keppel won spectacular acclaim and put Reynolds in enormous demand as a portrait painter. By 1755 the demand for Reynold's work was so great that he had painted more than 100 portraits. Few people in 18th century Britain regarded this practice of using the creations of the old masters to glorify English sitters as a form of artistic plagiarism. Indeed it was admired and applauded. While envious rivals of Reynolds sometimes whispered that he was making a fortune out of the concepts of other artists, the critics, connoisseurs and picture buyers did not see it that way. They agreed with Reynolds that he was naturalizing on British soil the noble tradition of the grand Italian style.

His most important conquest was Dr. Samuel Johnson, the acknowledged ruler of London's literary life. Johnson was fourteen years older than Reynolds, but the two became lifelong friends, and Reynolds often declared that Johnson was his source of wisdom and inspiration. Reynolds was a middle-class provincial with no formal education beyond his father's grammar school. Other intimates of Reynolds included Olver Goldsmith - poet, novelist and playwright - and Edmund Burke, a leading statesman as well as a man of letters. Encouraged and perhaps coached by his literary friends, Reynolds began to write articles on art and esthetics for the Idler, a literary magazine.

Business continued to flood into his studio. In order to handle the deluge - sometimes more than 150 portraits in a year - he employed a good deal of help. In the manner of Hudson, but never as mechanically, Reynolds planned and blocked out the portraits and painted the faces and other crucial parts himself. Under his watchful supervision his assistants did the rest, especially the clothes and backgrounds.

Shortly after the accession of George III, in 1760, Reynolds bought a large house in Leicester Fields (now Leicester Square), in the most fashionable part of London. There he built a splendid gallery to show his pictures. The mansion in Leicester Fields became one of London's leading intellectual and social centers. No 18th century British artist was as fiercely dedicated to the cause of British painting as Reynolds. Curiously enough, the snobbish and sometimes pompous Reynolds harbored a modesty about his own talent - and therein lay his strength. He began his career believing that he was an average painter who could rise to greatness by studying classical artists and European masters and applying their themes, compositions, settings and even their costumes to portraiture. This conviction became the driving force in his crusade to link British painting, which had little tradition of its own, to important European art thorough the ages. It also fueled his own work; while striving to duplicate the grand manner of the past, he never stopped trying to improve as a painter. And his range of creativity suggests that he achieved excellence despite his theories rather than because of them.

In 1768, when the Royal Academy of Art was founded to promote the fine arts in Britain, Reynolds was a natural choice for President. In 1769, taking his pedagogic functions very seriously, he delivered the first of his annual Discourses to the students of the academy in which he set forth the idealistic, moralizing principles of academic art. His authority in the Academy was paramount and with his fifteen Discourses (delivered over the next two decades) he became the official spokesman of the Academy’s thinking, and to an extent was personally responsible for developing its theory. The lectures were later published as “ The Discourse on Art” have become the classic expression of the academic doctrine of the Grand Manner.

In 1764 Reynolds founded the Literary Club, which included essayist and critic Samuel Johnson, actor David Garrick, statesman Edmund Burke, writer Oliver Goldsmith, writer James Boswell, and dramatist Richard Brinsley Sheridan. By this time, Reynolds had done more than any other artist had to raise the public profile and the social standing of the fine arts in Britain. In 1769 he was knighted by George III, and in 1784 he succeeded Allan Ramsay as painter to the king.

Reynolds is credited with more than 2000 portraits. Unfortunately, his use of bitumen (or asphalt) and experimental pigments and methods made some of his colors fade prematurely. Reynolds ceased to paint, because of failing eye-sight, in the summer of 1789 and he died in London on the 23rd of February, 1792.