Reynolds
Sir Joshua Reynolds was in his own day a commanding
figure, whose authority outlived him and who eventually became a target for
Romantic attacks. In Reynolds's day society portraiture had become a monotonous
repetition of the same theme. According to the formula, the sitter was to be
posed centrally, with the background (curtain, pillar, chair, perhaps a hint of
landscape) disposed like a back-drop behind; normally the head was done by the
master, the body by a pupil or "drapery assistant", who might serve
several painters. Pose and expression tended to be regulated to a standard of
polite and inexpressive elegance; the portrait told little about their
subjects other than that they were that sort of people who had their portraits
painted. They were effigies; life departed.
It was Reynolds who insisted in
his practice that a portrait could and should be also full, complex work of art
on many levels; he conceived his portraits in terms of history-painting. Each
fresh sitter was not just a physical fact to be recorded, but rather a story to
be told. His people are no longer static, but caught between one moment and the
next. Reynolds was indeed a consummate producer of character, and his
production methods reward investigation. For them he called upon the full
repertoire of the Old Masters.
Reynolds did the Grand Tour and
remained in Rome spellbound by the grandeur of Michelangelo, Raphael,
Tintoretto and Titian. He acquired a respectable knowledge of European
painting of the preceding two centuries, and gave at the Royal Academy of Arts which he helped to found in 1768 - the famous Discourses, which in published form, remain a formidable
body of Classical doctrine. In his Discourses Reynolds outlined the essence of grandeur in
art and suggested the means of achieving it through rigorous academic training
and study of the Old Masters. From 1769 nearly all Reynolds's paintings
appeared in the Academy. Reynolds's success as a portraitist was so great that
he was employing studio assistants to lay out the canvases for him and to do
much of the mechanical work. The artist's technique was sound, and many of his
works of art suffered as a resuit. After his visit to the Netherlands where he
studied the works of Kubens Reynolds's picture surface became far richer. This
is particularly true of his portrait the Duchess
of Devonshire and Her Daughter. Reynolds's state portraits of the
King and Queen were never successful, and he seldom painted for them. There is
inevitably something artificial about the grandiloquence of the Classical or
Renaissance poses in which he painted solid English men and women of his own
day, investing them with qualities borrowed from a noble past. Nonetheless, we
owe our impression of English aristocracy in (the eighteenth century to his majestic
portraits, with their contrived backgrounds of Classical architecture and
landscape. Lady Sara Bunbury Sacrificing to the Graces, of 1783, speaks eloquently for itself. Among Reynolds's best works are those in which he
departs from the tradition of ceremonial portraiture and abandons himself to
inspiration, as in The
Portrait of Nelly O'Brien, which is aglow with light, warmth and
feeling.
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