Sir Joshua Reynolds, probably the most famous British portrait painter, and first President of the Royal Academy of Arts, was born in south-west England on 16 July 1723, almost three centuries ago. To celebrate this anniversary, this is the first of three articles about his art, career and influence. Here I look at his main career, up to about 1780, during which he painted many of his finest portraits. Next week I’ll look at his more experimental painting, and on the anniversary of his birth I’ll consider his influence and importance to British painting.
Reynolds was born in the town of Plympton, then just outside the major naval port of Plymouth in Devon. Although his father was a former fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, and master at the local grammar school, his children weren’t destined for university or academia. In 1740, when he was seventeen, Reynolds was apprenticed to a London portrait painter, Thomas Hudson (1701-1779), who in turn had also been taught by an earlier portraitist. Although his apprenticeship should have expired four years later, Reynolds left Hudson a year early and started painting portraits on his own account in Plymouth.
After his father’s death in 1745, Reynolds continued to paint in Plymouth, where he was introduced to Commodore Augustus Keppel, who invited the young man to join him on board the Royal Naval warship HMS Centurion to visit the Mediterranean. When there, he left the ship to spend two years in Rome ‘studying the Masters’, but not apparently as a pupil of any of the masters there at the time. Reynolds then returned to Devon overland, arriving in England in October 1752.
After three months in Devon, Reynolds took his Italian travelling companion, Giuseppe Marchi (1735-1808), then aged seventeen, and set up his studio in London, with Marchi working as his assistant. Their portraiture business flourished during the late 1750s, and in 1760 Reynolds moved to a large house and studio in what is now Leicester Square.
Reynolds’ early Portrait of Lady Elizabeth Keppel (1739-1768), from 1761, is one of several he painted of his Naval patron and his family. Here the central figure is seen adorning a term (statue) of Hymen with garlands, and has turned to her servant, who seems to have been busy making those floral tributes. This refers back to notable paintings from more than a century earlier, by Nicolas Poussin and a collaboration between Rubens and Jan Brueghel the Elder, which could afford to be less coy about their terms, and generally quite ribald.
Lady Keppel was unmarried at the time, and is shown wearing her bridesmaid’s dress from the recent marriage of King George III to Queen Charlotte. Her offering to Hymen seems to have done the trick, as she married the Marquess of Tavistock three years later, but he died in a hunting accident three years after they married, and she died of tuberculosis two years later.
From the 1760s, Reynolds divided up the painting of portraits with assistants. He painted the subject’s head, while their clothing was usually added by one of his pupils, by Marchi, or Peter Toms, a specialist drapery painter. In this way he could complete paintings in a single hour-long sitting, with five or six sitters in a day.
As far as I’m aware, this painting of Count Ugolino and his Children in the Dungeon is the only work by Joshua Reynolds taken from Dante’s Divine Comedy. It was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1773, nearly five hundred years after the death of the Count.
His portrait of Anne Seymour Damer (née Conway) from 1773 shows his mature portraiture technique working well, with painterly highlights, and textures in the fabrics. Passages of flesh have aged well, with limited fine cracking apparent in the paint layer.
Reynolds’ group portrait of the Montgomery Sisters from 1773 refers back to that of Lady Keppel above, most obviously in its formal title of Three Ladies Adorning a Term of Hymen. These three young ladies are engaged in the nugatory ‘work’ of making floral garlands for the term behind them.
Terms are a variant of the classical Greek herma or herm, a sculpture consisting of a head and shoulders, sometimes also a torso, on a plain column of square section. Although quite widely used for sculpted heads, they attained a notoriety with the Romans, who called them termini, hence the English word term. This reputation arose from their association with figures of the god of fertility, Priapus, which often featured male genitalia, sometimes of alarming size.
It’s notable that, while Reynolds’ term doesn’t have a classical base with a square section, the garland cunningly passes in front of the area of its crotch. The title, though, tells us that this term was not Priapus, but Hymen, the more respectable ancient Greek god of marriage ceremonies. So Reynolds has artfully steered us away from danger, and declared the three ladies’ interests in marriage. In fact one had even married shortly before he painted this portrait.
In his portrait of Lady Elizabeth Delmé and Her Children (1777-9), above and detail below, Reynolds becomes painterly in their clothes and the background.
Reynolds’ portrait of Elizabeth, Countess of Warwick from about 1780, shown above and in the detail below, has remarkably loose brushwork in her hat and its extraordinary ribbons and feathers. She’s confined in a corset that enforces a tiny waist, as was fashionable at the time.
Unfortunately, Reynolds had fallen under a spell. In his bid to replicate the techniques of Rembrandt and Titian, he abandoned the conservative methods he had learned from Thomas Hudson, and started to experiment.
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