Joshua Reynolds

Joshua Reynolds was born on July 16, 1723, in Plympton, a small town in Devon, England. He was one of eleven children of Samuel Reynolds, a clergyman who ran Plympton's grammar school, and his wife Theophila ^[1]. The household was bookish rather than wealthy. Samuel taught his son himself, and the boy grew up surrounded by sermons, classical texts, and treatises on art, including Jonathan Richardson's essays on painting, which made a deep impression on him ^[2].

Unlike many painters of his era, Reynolds chose the profession deliberately and early. Richardson had argued that painting could be a learned, dignified calling rather than a mere trade, and that idea settled the matter for the young man from Devon. In 1740, at seventeen, he was apprenticed in London to Thomas Hudson, a fellow Devonian and one of the busiest portrait painters in England ^[1]. The apprenticeship was contracted for four years, but Reynolds left after less than three, returning to Devon to paint portraits of naval officers and local gentry around Plymouth Dock ^[3].

Those early Devon years mattered more than they might appear. The naval connections he made there gave him his greatest stroke of luck: a friendship with Commodore Augustus Keppel, who in 1749 offered the young painter passage aboard HMS Centurion on a voyage to the Mediterranean ^[2].

Reynolds spent more than two years in Italy, from 1750 to 1752, with Rome as his base. He copied and studied the works of Raphael, Michelangelo, and the Venetian colorists, filling sketchbooks with notes on composition, light, and expression ^[3]. He later said the experience taught him what painting could aspire to. It also cost him something permanent: a severe cold caught while working in the chilly corridors of the Vatican left him partially deaf, and he carried an ear trumpet for the rest of his life ^[1].

The Italian journey supplied the core of his artistic program. Reynolds concluded that British portraiture, then dominated by stiff formulas and flattering surfaces, could borrow the seriousness of Renaissance history painting. A general could be posed like a Roman statue; an actress could become a sibyl or a muse. This approach, later labeled the Grand Manner, became his signature and one of the most imitated ideas in British art ^[4].

He returned to London in 1752 after a stop in Devon and quickly announced himself. His full-length portrait of Commodore Keppel, painted around 1752 to 1753, showed the officer striding along a storm-lashed shore in a pose adapted from classical sculpture. The picture caused a stir and brought fashionable London to his door ^[2].

By the late 1750s Reynolds was the most sought-after portraitist in Britain, at times receiving well over a hundred sitters a year. He ran an efficient studio with assistants and drapery painters, kept meticulous pocket books recording appointments, and raised his prices steadily as demand grew ^[3]. In 1760 he moved into a large house on the west side of Leicester Fields (now Leicester Square), complete with a gallery for displaying his work and a grand studio for receiving clients ^[1].

The defining moment of any account of Joshua Reynolds achievements came in 1768, when King George III approved the founding of the Royal Academy of Arts. Reynolds was elected its first president, and the king knighted him the following year ^[4]. Between 1769 and 1790 he delivered fifteen presidential lectures to the Academy's students, published as the Discourses on Art. In them he argued that great art depends on study, judgment, and the imitation of the best masters rather than on unguided natural talent. The Discourses became a foundational text of academic art theory in the English-speaking world and remained on artists' reading lists well into the nineteenth century ^[5].

His painted output was enormous. The modern catalogue of his work, compiled by David Mannings, documents roughly two thousand portraits and subject pictures ^[6]. Among the most celebrated are Sarah Siddons as the Tragic Muse (1784), which enthroned the actress like a figure from Michelangelo's Sistine ceiling, his brooding self-portraits, and a long series of tender, unsentimental portraits of children. In 1784, after the death of Allan Ramsay, he was appointed Principal Painter in Ordinary to the King, the highest official post available to a British artist ^[4].

Reynolds never married. His household in Leicester Fields was managed first by his sister Frances, herself a painter, and later by his niece Mary Palmer, who became his heir ^[1]. He was sociable to an unusual degree for a working artist, and his dinner table was famous for its crowded, informal hospitality, where guests reportedly scrambled for plates while the host, trumpet in hand, strained to follow the conversation ^[3].

His friendships defined literary London as much as artistic London. In 1764 he founded, with Samuel Johnson, the dining society known simply as The Club, whose members came to include Edmund Burke, Oliver Goldsmith, David Garrick, and James Boswell ^[7]. Johnson called Reynolds one of the most invulnerable men he knew, a person whom malice could not easily wound. Goldsmith dedicated his poem The Deserted Village to him, and Boswell dedicated the Life of Johnson to him in turn ^[7].

Reynolds was also a serious collector, assembling one of the notable private holdings of old master paintings and drawings in Georgian England ^[6]. His relations with rivals were correct rather than warm. Thomas Gainsborough, his great competitor, kept his distance for most of their careers, though the two men were reconciled shortly before Gainsborough's death in 1788, and Reynolds devoted his fourteenth Discourse to a generous assessment of his rival's genius ^[5].

The 1780s brought honors and losses in nearly equal measure. Reynolds continued to paint at a high level, and a visit to Flanders and the Netherlands in 1781 renewed his admiration for Rubens, whose warmth of color left visible traces in his late work ^[3]. Yet his lifelong habit of technical experimentation began to betray him. He mixed unstable pigments such as carmine and used bitumen and wax in ways that caused many canvases to fade or crack within his own lifetime, a problem conservators still manage today ^[6].

In July 1789 the sight in his left eye failed, and within months he gave up painting almost entirely ^[1]. He delivered his final Discourse to the Academy in December 1790, closing with a tribute to Michelangelo and the wish that the last words he spoke in that place should be the name of that master ^[5]. A dispute over the appointment of an Academy professor had briefly driven him to resign the presidency earlier that year, but colleagues persuaded him to return.

Reynolds died at his house in Leicester Fields on February 23, 1792, aged sixty eight, after an illness caused by a diseased liver. His body lay in state at the Royal Academy's rooms in Somerset House, and he was buried with great ceremony in the crypt of St Paul's Cathedral, his pallbearers including three dukes and two marquesses ^[4]. Edmund Burke, who was at his bedside, wrote an obituary tribute calling him the first Englishman to add the praise of the elegant arts to the other glories of his country ^[7].

Any honest Joshua Reynolds biography has to weigh two legacies at once: the paintings and the institution. The Royal Academy he led for nearly a quarter century professionalized art training in Britain and gave artists a public platform they had never possessed. Its annual exhibition, its schools, and the presidential office he defined all outlived him, and the initials PRA (President of the Royal Academy) still carry the shape he gave them ^[4].

His influence on portraiture was equally durable. Thomas Lawrence, John Hoppner, and later Victorian and Edwardian society painters worked in his shadow, and American artists such as Gilbert Stuart absorbed his example in London. The Discourses were studied, quoted, and argued with for over a century; William Blake famously covered his copy with furious marginal notes, which is its own kind of tribute to the book's authority ^[5].

Among the plainer Joshua Reynolds facts is the sheer reach of his work today. Major holdings sit in the National Gallery and Tate in London, the Wallace Collection, the Huntington in California, and the Yale Center for British Art, while his portraits of Johnson, Keppel, and Siddons remain among the most reproduced images of Georgian Britain ^[8]. His hometown of Plympton, where his father once taught school, elected him mayor in 1773, an honor he claimed to prize alongside his knighthood. More than two centuries after his death, Reynolds remains the painter through whom eighteenth-century Britain chose to see itself ^[2].