(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:
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When Richard Wilson was already learning the business of portrait-painting in London, Joshua Reynolds was a little boy of six. He also was the son of a clergyman, the Rev. Samuel Reynolds of Plympton Earl, near Plymouth, where Joshua, the seventh son, was born on July 16, 1723. Sir Godfrey Kneller died the same year.
Nature and Fortune were both kind to Reynolds; the first endowed him with courtly manners as well as talent, the second gave him opportunities to use these to the best advantage. Doubtless Reynolds would have made his way to the front, by one path if not by another, but it was a piece of good luck for him when the Commodore Keppel of the Centurion put in at Plymouth for repairs, and met the young painter at the house of Lord Mount –Edgcumbe. Keppel took a liking to the painter and offered him a free passage on his ship to the Mediterranean. Reynolds gladly accepted, and after a long stay with Keppel at Minorca, went on to Rome, where he gave himself up to that worship of Michael Angelo that he retained all his life. His well-known deafness dates from this early period, and was the result of a cold which he caught while copying at the Vatican.
From Rome, Reynolds went to Florence, Venice, and other Italian cities, returning to England in 1753, and then he settled in London, never to leave it again except for a holiday. His younger sister Frances kept house for him, and he never married; like Michael Angelo, the object of his worship, Reynolds said he was ‘wedded to his art.’ After living for a time at 104 St Martin’s Lane, and then at 5 Great Newport Street, he made his permanent home at 47 Leicester Square, and Messrs. Puttick & Simpson now hold their auctions in the room that was once his studio.
Reynolds did not capture the town at first assault; the deep richness of the coloring he had adopted from the Venetian masters, and the atmospheric contours of his forms, did not appeal to connoisseurs accustomed to the lighter color and harder outlines of Kneller; but supported by the influence of Lord Mount-Edgcumbe and Admiral Keppel, he gradually became acknowledged as the head of his profession. When the Royal Academy was founded, his appointment as President met with universal approbation, for it was felt that no painter could fill the office so well. Reynolds, as Mr E V Lucas points out, ‘was sought not only for his brush, but also for his company; and though he did not court high society, he was sensible of the advantages it gave him. Other and finer intellects also welcomed him—such as Dr Johnson, Burke, and Goldsmith—and his house became a center of good talk.’
Reynolds was not only a great painter, but a great gentleman, for long before the King knighted him in 1769, five days before the opening of the first Academy exhibition, he had shown court and society ‘that a painter could be a wise man and a considerable man as well.’
The story of Sir Joshua’s life is not dramatic; it is the placid, smoothly running story of his art, of well-chosen friendships, of kindly actions, occasional displays of professional jealousy—for he was human and not an angel—and of a happy domestic life. When his brother-in-law Mr Palmer died in 1770, Sir Joshua adopted his daughter Theophila, then thirteen, and later her sister Mary Palmer also came to live with him, so that though a bachelor Reynolds was not without young people in his house. Both his nieces remained with him till they married, and it was Theophila’s daughter, little Theophila Gwatkin, who was the original of one of Reynold’s most charming and popular paintings, ‘The Age of Innocence.’
His grand-niece was six years old when Reynolds, in 1788, painted her portrait, a work which in conception and in every touch proclaims that it was ‘a labor of love.’ Indeed, nowhere do the simplicity, the benevolence, and the affectionate nature of the man shine out more beautifully than in his paintings of children. Splendid and decorative in its color-scheme and open air setting, his ‘Mrs Richard Hoare with her Infant Son’ in the Wallace Collection has the same winning simplicity of intention; for it is much more than a mere portrait, it is a grave and tender expression of a mother’s love. The other side of Sir Joshua’s art, ‘the grand manner,’ is seen in the famous ‘Mrs Siddons as the Tragic Muse’ and in ‘Miss Emily Pott as Thais’. This was the side most admired by his contemporaries, and we must admit that Reynolds had a rare power of dramatic presentation, which found its happiest outlet when he was dealing with contemporary subjects. ‘The Tragic Muse’ is something of a wreck today, because in his desire to emulate the deep, rich coloring of the Venetians, Reynolds made use of bitumen, a pigment which gives brilliant immediate results but never dries, and in time trickles down a canvas in channels, ruining its surface. This pigment, which liquefies like asphalt when the sun is hot, is chiefly responsible for the poor condition today of many paintings by Reynolds, and it must be admitted that as a craftsman he was not so particular as Wilson and Hogarth, who were more careful in their choice of pigments.
When Sir Joshua was sixty six he lost the sight of his left eye and from this calamity and the dread of losing the other, which was threatened, he never recovered. For three years he lingered on, seeing his friends and bearing his infirmity with fortitude, but the will to live was gone when he could no longer practice his art with assurance. He died on February 23, 1792, and was buried in state at St Paul’s Cathedral.
‘I know of no man who has passed through life with more observation than Reynolds,’ said Dr Johnson; ‘when Reynolds tells me anything, I consider myself as possessed of an idea the more.’ Sir Joshua himself was distinguished by his literary abilities, and his ‘Discourses on Painting,’ which formed his yearly address to the students of the Royal Academy, are treasured and read today both for their literary merit and their instructive art teaching.
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