MASTERPIECES
IN COLOUR

EDITED BY . .
T. LEMAN HARE

REYNOLDS

1723-1792

In the Same Series

Others in Preparation.

REYNOLDS

BY S. L. BENSUSAN
ILLUSTRATED WITH EIGHT
REPRODUCTIONS IN COLOUR

LONDON: T. C. & E. C. JACK
NEW YORK: FREDERICK A. STOKES CO.

[Pg vii]

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

[Pg 9]

There are certain men born to every
generation who approach life with
the complete assurance of distinction in any
work that they may have chosen for the
exercise of their gifts. They are strangers
to doubt and uncertainty; they disarm Fortune
by claiming freely as a right what she
[Pg 10]is accustomed to grant grudgingly as a
favour—”they ride Life’s lists as a knight
might ride.” One feels that these fortunate
few are destined for success just as the
majority are doomed to failure, that nothing
save a long series of mishaps can keep them
from the goal of their ambition. They have
the temperament that makes achievement
easy, and a steadfast determination that the
demons of mischance cannot resist for long.

When one turns to consider English art
in the eighteenth century, the name of
Joshua Reynolds stands out in a brighter
light than any other. One would not say
that he was the greatest painter of his time—Gainsborough’s
gifts exceeded his in many
directions, and Romney enters into competition
too—but Reynolds was born under
a fortunate star, and Nature gave him as
a birthday present a rare mixture of talent,[Pg 11]
industry, and common-sense, together with
a sober judgment that could not be turned
aside by passion or emotion. Such gifts,
if they do not always create a genius, may
enable their possessor to achieve work that
has certain affinities with the masterpieces
of the immortals. Nobody in these days
would deny for a moment that Reynolds
possessed qualifications of the highest order;
but ours is an age of hero-worship, and we
are rather inclined to go beyond our brief
in dealing with a representative man whose
work has survived the criticism (though,
alas, it has not always survived the atmosphere)
of nearly two centuries. Reynolds
is not the less a great painter because he
did not happen to be the great man so many
of his biographers have seen, nor was he a
heaven-sent genius of the kind that flutters
the musical dovecots from time to time.[Pg 12]
Infant prodigies are hardly known in the
world of art, and Reynolds started life as
a clever young man determined to make a
name. He became soon a painter strong
enough to realise his own limitations and
those of his age, and to take the best possible
steps to secure for his own art, and incidentally
for that of his country, the highest
position in the esteem of the world at large.
Had there been no Reynolds there might
have been no Royal Academy—the Institution
in its earliest days was indebted very
deeply to him. Himself far above the
squabbles of the hour, he raised the Royal
Academy into the serene and almost untroubled
atmosphere in which he lived his
life.

“I will be a painter, if you will give me
the chance of being a good one,” he is
said to have remarked when quite a lad,
[Pg 15]
and this is but one of the simple sentences
that hold and in a sense reveal the keynote
of his character. Reynolds was determined
to succeed. When he started his work
there were few people in England who could
guide him in the right way, and consequently
we must not look for any great
achievement in the early portraits. The
painter may be said to have owed his first
success to Commodore Keppel, who took him
on a cruise in the Mediterranean and helped
him to come into touch with the great masterpieces
that will probably stimulate artists
for all time. In return, the painter gave
the sailor a measure of fame that his naval
achievements would hardly have secured.

Italy turned the dross of Reynolds’ art to
fine gold, and he never shrank from acknowledging
the debt. Had he stayed in England
he might have been a greater man than[Pg 16]
all his contemporaries, save Gainsborough
and Romney, but he could not have given
the world any one of the pictures that are
reproduced here. Art will not yield to inspiration
alone. The musician, or the literary
man, with very simple education may be
able to achieve wonders, but the artist
who looks to brushes and colours for his
medium must sacrifice diligently for many
years at the shrine of technique before his
hand can express what is in his brain. The
years between 1749 and 1752, devoted by
Reynolds to studying and copying the
Vatican frescoes and the pictures of Padua,
Milan, Turin, and Paris, were invaluable.
Indeed he was one of the greatest copyists
of his time, and Sir Walter Armstrong thinks
that one of his copies of a Rembrandt is
classed among the originals in the National
Gallery to-day![Pg 17]

Down to the year of the Italian journey
the young painter’s life had been quite
uneventful. Born in 1723 at Plympton in
Devonshire, where his father was a school-master,
he was apprenticed in London to
Thomas Hudson, a portrait painter of the
day and a Devon man too. Hudson gave
his pupil Guercino’s drawings to copy.
Before the time of apprenticeship had expired
Reynolds had quarrelled with his
master and gone back to Devonshire, where
he painted work that was of no great importance,
under the patronage of the first
Lord Edgcumbe. At his house Reynolds
met the Commodore Keppel, whose kindness
enabled him to see Italy, and it was
the sojourn in that real home of art that
brought Reynolds back to England a portrait
painter of the first class.

Michelangelo had impressed him deeply.[Pg 18]
In later days he never lost an opportunity of
advising students to sit at the feet of the
great master, and the influence of the work
in the Sistine Chapel may be noted in the
famous picture of Mrs. Siddons, now to
be seen in the Dulwich Gallery. Ludovico
Caracci and Guido had given him hints
that were of infinite value in the moulding
of his technique; for colour he had gone to
Titian, Tintoretto, and Rubens, of whom the
last named was beginning to lose his appeal
in the last years of Reynolds’ life. Sir
Joshua had a supreme facility for taking
from every artist the best that was in him,
melting it in the crucible of his own thought,
and applying the product to his pictures.
There is no doubt that the sixteenth-century
Venetians impressed Reynolds as much as
they impressed Ruskin at a later date, but
in the middle of the eighteenth century the[Pg 19]
school of Bologna was in the ascendant in
England, and it is through Reynolds’ actions
rather than his words that we see how Venice
had influenced him. Sir Walter Armstrong
thinks that Reynolds lived well rather than
wisely in Italy, and that when he came back
to town his wild oats were all sown, but it
is hard to find any justification for the belief
that Reynolds was at any time of his life a
free liver. The pleasures of the table may
have claimed him when he reached middle
age; indeed, Dr. Johnson said to him on
one occasion, “You complain about the tea
I drink, but I do not count the glasses you
empty,” or words to that effect. As far as
other forms of dissipation go, there is no
evidence that Reynolds was ever a victim
to them. He was always perfect master of
his self-control, and when the years had
toned down certain faults of thought and[Pg 20]
manner, he became mellowed, like old wine,
and not less stimulating.

Students of the famous discourses that
Sir Joshua addressed annually to the Royal
Academy after he became first President
of the new institution, may be justified if
they suspect that the great painter adopted
the same rule in dealing with his students
that skilled musical composers use when
dealing with their pupils. A musican knows
that the laws of harmony and counterpoint
are not fixed, that the musical horizon
widens year by year, and that rules may
often be disregarded by a composer who
has something to say; but, in order that
composition may grow from some definite
form, it is necessary that the rules should
be mastered before they are disregarded. So
in dealing with things of art, Reynolds said
much to his audience that his own practice[Pg 21]
did not bear out. He would not hint at
his own preferences quite so frankly as his
canvases did and it is not at all unlikely
that he realised as well as we do, that
while students, like the poor, are always
with us, great artists are few and far
between, and will survive all academic
limitations.

When Reynolds came back to England
in 1752, he went down to Devonshire to recruit
his health. While his sojourn abroad
had been productive of so much that had
been invaluable to him, he had met with
two unfortunate accidents. In Minorca
he had fallen from his horse and sustained
injuries that had left his face scarred for
all time. In the Vatican he had sustained
a chill that brought about the deafness
destined to be a life-long infirmity. So he
took holiday in the county he loved so[Pg 22]
well, and after his return he opened a
studio in St. Martin’s Street, acting on
the advice of his friend and patron, Lord
Edgcumbe. There was no period of weary
waiting. Thanks to the quality of his work
and the patronage granted so freely, he
began at once to enjoy the success that
belongs to the popular portrait painter. A
little later he moved to Great Newport
Street, where the accommodation was better
suited to the growing claims of sitters, and
in 1760 he went to 47 Leicester Square,
now an auction-house, where he lived for
the remainder of his life. As he moved
he raised his prices, but nobody seemed to
mind. Everybody who was anybody, paid
cheerfully. So did some of the other people.

Many artists remain painters all their
lives. Meet them in a studio or at a
private view and they are illuminating;
[Pg 25]
talk about another lying outside their
immediate interests and they are dumb,
or worse, for some talk without saying
anything, as though they were mere politicians.
Perhaps we have no right to
complain of this lack of mental dimensions,
but it is permissible to note with pleasure
the few cases in which an artist reveals
himself as an accomplished man of the
world. Reynolds would never have been
content to be nothing more than a painter,
and he chose his friends so wisely that
the living served him as well as the dead.
If the great artists of Italy had shed light
upon his path in one direction, what did
he not owe to the men of his own generation,
whose society must have been a
source of inspiration to any intelligent man?
Dr. Johnson himself could only have been
inspiring company, even though we may[Pg 26]
think in our heart of hearts that the benefit
of the inspiration was not without serious
drawbacks. Reynolds enjoyed also the
intimate friendship of Garrick, Goldsmith,
Gibbon, and Burke, he consorted with many
other men who made some mark in the
world of thought, and in this atmosphere
the extraordinary receptivity of his mind
must have served him to great advantage.
He had human weaknesses to live down,
and it is to his credit that he conquered
all or most of them. Like so many honest
Englishmen, there was a touch of the snob
about him—witness his correspondence with
Lord Edgcumbe during the first visit to
the Continent. He was not without jealousy,
as may be seen from his pettish condemnation
of the work of Liotard, the miniature
painter and pastellist, and his references to
Gainsborough and Romney, whose success[Pg 27]
and accomplishments galled him not a
little. He was vulgar, until he learned
refinement from the distinguished people
with whom he was brought into contact—witness
the gilded coach and gaudy liveries
he bought when he established himself in
Leicester Square, the coach in which his
unfortunate sister Frances was compelled
to drive in order that the man in the street
might stare open-mouthed and talk about
her brother. There is hardly a “Lion
Comique,” or a lady of the music halls
drawing prime minister’s salary for songs
blatant or obscene, who would commit such
an offence to-day, and against these lapses
from taste Sir Joshua’s acquaintance with
the best minds of his day failed to save him.
Perhaps the atmosphere of Leicester Square
in the eighteenth, as in the twentieth,
century was a little theatrical. Of course[Pg 28]
the faults of a man and the merits of his
work are distinct and stand apart from
one another, but we are too apt to look
at Reynolds the man in the light of Goldsmith’s
epitaph, and it is the failing of
popular biography to supply popular people
with a measure of moral equipment that
would make a saint self-conscious. It is far
more interesting to see great men as they
lived, and understand that, like the rest of
us, they had a fair, or unfair, share of
faults. Had Sir Joshua possessed twice as
many failings, he would still remain one
of the greatest, if not the greatest, of
British portrait painters. Had he associated
all the virtues with less achievement, he
could not have interested us, because
happily we do not judge art by the moral
standard of the artist.

Perhaps the most remarkable side of[Pg 29]
Reynolds’ mind was seen in its response
to the real truths that underlie all the arts.
He held his work to be a mode of expressing
human experience, he knew that there was
a domain lying beyond the reach of rules,
and bade his students look “with dilated
eye,” sacrificing detail to general effect for
the sake of the best and most imaginative
work. He declared without any reservations,
that he had found art in England in
the lowest possible state, he compared some
of his contemporaries’ work with sign-post
painting, but his fine courage was only stimulated
by the bad conditions that prevailed.
He sought to raise them, and as a portrait
painter, made it his business to discover
the perfections of his sitters, with the result,
that, as his genius was wholly interpretative,
his pictures stand rather less for his sitters
than for their time.[Pg 30]

A weak man might have succumbed to
the temptations that beset Reynolds when
he had established himself in Leicester
Square. He was in a sense the darling of
society, earning a larger income than had
been gained by any of his contemporaries,
although he painted for prices that a third-rate
man could gain to-day, if we do not
regard the changed value of money. But
Reynolds never succumbed to society; he
conquered it, showing himself worthy of all
the success that came to him. He did his
best, he worked hard, relaxing his efforts
only when his position was unassailable, took
his enjoyment temperately, if we consider
the age in which he lived, and never forgot
that his chief aim and object in life was to
paint portraits, and to paint them as well
as he could. There were years in which
he completed from three to four portraits[Pg 31]
every week, but by the time he was President
of the Royal Academy, the output had
fallen to sixty or seventy a year, no small
achievement for a man who was at liberty
to enjoy all that was best, and brightest,
and most enduring in London society, and
everything most attractive in the country.

The life and times of Sir Joshua have a
special interest for British artists, even
apart from his work, because he lived
through the years of storm and strife that
saw the development of the R.A. It is not
easy to tell in full the story of its establishment
without long and detailed references
to the quarrels and intrigues of the artists
of the day and even then it is not easy to
see the truth clearly through the mists of
controversy. None of Sir Joshua’s biographies
goes uncontradicted, and it is safe
to say that we must be content to forego[Pg 32]
for all time exact knowledge of certain
incidents in the life of Reynolds. He had
considerable reserve, a fair sense of diplomacy,
and was not without knowledge that
there were foes as well as friends in the
crowd that surrounded him. His contemporaries
were often baffled by his silence,
and the secrets of his tastes and intimate
likes and dislikes died with him. He had
friends, but no confidantes. A brief outline
of the creation of the R.A. is all that needs
be given here.

In the year 1760, when Reynolds was
approaching the zenith of his fame, an art
exhibition was held in London, attracted
a great deal of attention, and became an
annual institution. Thereafter, we begin to
hear of the Society of Artists, which received
from George III. a certificate of Incorporation
in 1765, blossomed out with the grandiloquent
[Pg 35]
title of the “Incorporated Society
of Artists of Great Britain,” and published
a list of two hundred and eleven members,
including Joshua Reynolds. An offshoot
from this society was known as the Free
Society of Artists; in the history of art there
have always been some men “agin the
government.” Heart-burning and jealousy
were associated with the work of the Incorporated
Society, and William Chambers the
architect, who had the king’s ear, brought
about the foundation of the R.A. Reynolds
took no visible part in the intrigue, in fact
he was abroad during the months when
the squabbles were most violent, and when
the Presidency was offered to him, he
asked for time to discuss the matter with
Dr. Johnson and Edmund Burke. Apparently
he had studied Shakspere’s “Julius Cæsar.”
In December 1768, the constitution of the[Pg 36]
Royal Academy was signed by the King, and
the Incorporated Society was left to linger for
a few years in the cold shades of opposition
and then depart from a world that had no
further use for it. William Chambers and
Benjamin West seem to have done all that
was necessary to bring King George on to
the side of the new venture, which had
a very wide constitution, and thirty-six
original members, including two ladies, Angelica
Kaufmann and Mary Moser. William
Chambers became Treasurer, Dalton was
appointed Antiquary, Goldsmith was Professor
of Ancient History, and Dr. Johnson
stood for Ancient Literature. Curiously
enough, it was the foundation by Captain
Coram of the Foundling Hospital that led
indirectly to the creation of the Royal
Academy. Hogarth, who was a great friend
of Coram, gave pictures for the gallery in[Pg 37]
the Hospital, Reynolds’ old master, Hudson,
Reynolds himself, and Wilson, a contemporary
painter of great achievement, did
the same. Mr. Claude Phillips, whose life
of Sir Joshua Reynolds is one of the best
written and most discerning tributes to the
master extant, thinks that the success of
the gallery at the Foundlings led to the
opening of the first exhibition of pictures
by living masters in 1860. The Society of
Arts was then six years old, and the Society
of Artists was established in friendly rivalry.
We have remarked that at the time when
the Incorporated Society of Artists was engaged
in the final quarrel that led to the
foundation of the Academy, Sir Joshua was
travelling abroad with Richard Burke. His
absence from the scene of strife is more
likely to have been diplomatic than unintentional.[Pg 38]

II

We have now come down to the year
1769, and may pause with advantage to
recall some of Sir Joshua’s achievements
and experiences that have been omitted
from a rather hurried survey. He has
already painted many of the most famous
men and women of his time, and his contributions
to the exhibitions of the Society
of Artists have been the admiration of all
who take an interest in pictures. Here
some of his most famous pictures have
been hung, the “Lady Elizabeth Keppel as
a bridesmaid,” the “Countess Waldegrave,”
“Garrick between Tragedy and Comedy”
(now in Lord Rothschild’s town house) and
many others too numerous to be mentioned
in such a brief review as this.

He has made another pleasant journey
[Pg 41]
into Devonshire, this time in company with
Dr. Johnson, whose consumption of cider
and cream has created a mild sensation.
He has visited Wilton and Longford, where
some of his works may be seen to-day; he
has enlarged his circle of friends, while his
acquaintances are as the sands upon the
seashore for multitude. He belongs to the
once famous Dilettanti Society, founded in
1732 to study antiquities and arts; he has
painted his own portrait to celebrate his
election, and presented it to the Society.
It may be seen in the Grafton Gallery to-day,
together with two groups of members
painted at a later date.

His drawing has become strong, his
modelling firm, and his colour has many of
the qualities that distinguished the Venetian
masters he loved so well, but, alas, he has
not learned the secrets of permanent colour[Pg 42]ing,
and some of his most brilliant glazes
are beginning to fade before the eyes of
the troubled owners of the pictures. He
has surrendered to the pseudo-classicism
of his age, and some of his compositions
are absurdly indebted to mythology; but
the fault was a virtue then, and while we
complain it is only right to refer the grievance
to the time rather than to the man, and
a study of Boswell explains the painter’s
attitude, even though it cannot justify it.

He has found time to enjoy the pursuits
of a country gentleman; he shoots and hunts
in the best sporting circles. His home in
Leicester Square is open to all sorts and
conditions of men; the leading lights of the
day—Gainsborough and Romney excepted—are
welcome. He keeps a liberal but ill-served
table, and his friends will find a
welcome if they call in time for dinner at[Pg 43]
five o’clock, even if they must scramble for
a fair share of the meal. He has lost the
raw manners of early years, faux pas are
few and far between. From Johnson he has
acquired a certain literary style, rather heavy
and turgid, perhaps, but precise and final.
It is possible, but not certain, that “The
Club” has been established, and that the
twelve original members are meeting for
supper at the sign of the Turk’s Head in
Gerrard Street. He has pupils, for whom
he does little or nothing, and assistants who
paint draperies for him, and receive a little
useful instruction now and again. Northcote,
who is to publish his “Memoirs of
Sir Joshua Reynolds” nearly half a century
later, and become the one successful painter
from the Leicester Square establishment,
has met the great man in Devonshire with
emotions similar to those that Reynolds[Pg 44]
felt in the far away days when, an unknown
pupil of Hudson, he saw the great and distinguished
author of “The Rape of the
Lock” in the centre of an admiring and
respectful crowd.

Who shall do justice to the crowds that
thronged the studio? Certainly mere words
cannot picture the scenes that the old house
in Leicester Square witnessed in those stirring
times. Deafness could hardly have been
an unmixed evil to a man whose sitters were
of the most diverse kind. Leslie and Taylor
in their voluminous work, “The Life and
Times of Sir Joshua Reynolds,” have written
at length upon this aspect of the painter’s
daily life, and have described the constant
stream of men and women who could not
have been placed side by side for five minutes
save on the walls of the exhibition. Representatives
of the most opposed school of[Pg 45]
politics, High Church dignitaries, courtesans,
soldiers, flaneurs, society women, sailors,
ambassadors, actors, children, members of
the Royal Family, men from the street, like
White the paviour—one and all claimed the
measure of immortality that his brush confers,
and if his best work could but have retained
its qualities, the latter half of the eighteenth
century would be preserved for us in fashion
calculated to make future generations envious.
Unfortunately, Sir Walter Armstrong, the
painter’s most trenchant latter day critic, is
justified when he writes: “Speaking roughly,
Sir Joshua’s early pictures darken, the works
of his middle period fade, those of his late
maturity crack. The productions of his first
youth and of his old age stand best of all.”
When the worst has been said, it is a glorious
heritage that the painter left to his country,
but who can avoid regrets when thinking[Pg 46]
what it might have been if Reynolds had
mastered the secrets of permanent colour, if
the carmine and lake had endured, and the
more brilliant effects had not been so largely
experimental—if he had given them a fair
trial in studies before he used them for his
best work? Perhaps his success left no
time for experiments. Sitters were urgent
and could not wait while the painter studied
the question of the chemistry of pigments.

There is a curiously sane and optimistic
note about all the Reynolds portraits. Even
where he does not succeed—in painting
portrait groups, for example—the fault is
merely one of composition, he keeps to his
earliest intention of expressing what is best
in the sitter, and seeing him “with dilated
eye”; he is merely unable to set several
figures upon the same canvas. Save for
ever increasing deafness and a little trouble[Pg 47]
with sister Frances, who keeps house for
him and is not cast in the same placid
mould, nothing occurs to disturb the even
tenor of his happy life. Intellect rules emotions—either
he has no feeling for intrigue
or he can keep his emotions beyond the
reach of prying eyes. Even his relations
with Angelica Kaufmann, now in her twenty-eighth
year, and an original member of
the Royal Academy, baffle the censors
who would fain discover that she was the
painter’s mistress. “His heart has grown
callous by contact with women,” says one
of his contemporaries or biographers, and
this may well be so. Angelica Kaufmann
was one of the women who attract men,
and there is no evidence to show that
Reynolds was more than a good friend to
her. Long years later, when the visits to
Leicester Square could have been no more[Pg 48]
than a memory, she attracted Goethe, who
used to read to her some of his unpublished
work. The painter’s self-control has made
some of his biographers angry; they write
as though fearful lest, on account of his
virtue, there shall be no more cakes and
ale, and ginger shall no longer be hot in
the mouth. If they could but catch him
tripping, he might return to the highest
place in their affections, and all would be
forgiven. There is something so human in
this attitude that it becomes almost tolerable,
though it is hard to avoid a smile when
one finds that the subject of the relations
between Sir Joshua and Miss Kaufmann have
been discussed quite seriously by foreign
writers. If Sir Joshua could have made the
lady a better artist, if it can be shown
that he saved her from being a worse one
than she was, there is something to write
[Pg 51]
about; the subject of their personal relations
cannot possibly concern the world at
large, and is not worth a tithe of the ink
that has been spilt in attack or defence.

III

We owe an apology to the new President
whom we left standing upon the threshold
of the Royal Academy, which opened its
doors with a first exhibition of one hundred
and thirty-six pictures! The memory of
this commendable modesty should not be
allowed to fade in these days when canvas
stretches by the acre over the long-suffering
walls of Burlington House, when artists
appear not singly but in battalions and
the cry is “still they come.” In April 1769
Reynolds received the honour of knighthood
and this seems to have put the finishing
touches to his social claims. Henceforward[Pg 52]
he painted fewer portraits; the records of
1771 credit him with a mere seventy, and
though this figure may make modern men
gasp, it compares but feebly with the one
hundred and eighty-four that stood to the
credit of an earlier year. The President increased
the number of his clubs, enlarged his
dining circle, became more and more dignified,
mellow, gracious, and urbane, farther
removed than before from the turmoil that
was going on in art circles of the less
successful men around him. Having all the
cream he required, he was not concerned
with quarrels about skimmed milk. Some
of his biographers think that Romney was
beginning to compete with the master, and
that this competition accounts for the diminishing
number of his sitters, but it is reasonable
to suppose that a man who can make
his own prices and is beyond the reach of[Pg 53]
want may regard seventy portraits as a very
satisfactory output for one year, when he
has other duties to fulfil and is by temperament
a lover of the world’s good things.
Fortune could have given him nothing more,
unless the hearing that passed in the old days
of the pilgrimage to Rome had been restored,
and if such a miracle could have been vouchsafed,
the painter’s splendid indifference to
matters that annoy quick, nervous temperaments
might have passed, and the latter days
might have been clouded. If wisdom at one
entrance was nearly shut out, there was
plenty left, as may be gathered from a study
of the Discourses. Their vitality is proved
by the fact that new editions are still called
for, and many members of the more modern
schools of painting declare that Reynolds
saw some aspects of painting with twentieth-century
eyes.[Pg 54]

In 1773 Plympton remembered its famous
artist and elected him mayor, an honour
that touched him nearly. One cannot help
thinking that it was more to him even
than the degree of Doctor of Civil Law,
conferred in the same year by Oxford University
de honoris causa, though this too
helped him to paint his own portrait in
flamboyant style, and the artist loved colour.
One portrait of himself was sent to the
town of Plympton and hung between two
pictures that were “old masters” according
to the leading lights of the Corporation.
In truth, they were two of Sir Joshua’s
own early works, and from this simple
story we may learn that artists come and
artists go, but the mental calibre of corporations
is constant and not subject to
change. He sent another picture of himself
to the Uffizzi Gallery in Florence,[Pg 55]
where so many Masters stand self-committed
to canvas in pictures that do not err upon
the side of making the sitters lack distinction.

The next eight years were uneventful,
save for the fact that the President was
doing some of his best work and enjoying
life in the fullest and most complete fashion
imaginable. Nearly all who knew him loved
him, and to the great majority of men and
women he was just and kind. For a man
so completely free from emotion and self-revelation,
Reynolds claimed a very large
circle of intimates, and it was hardly an age
of introspection. Men confessed themselves
to their Maker but not to their friends;
the formalities of life and speech presented
an effective barrier to the emotions, even
the stage was as artificial and pompous as
it could be. One may perhaps acknowledge[Pg 56]
an uneasy feeling that David Garrick himself
would make a very small impression upon
a latter-day audience, if he confronted it
with the mid-eighteenth-century style of
speech and action.

In 1780 the Academy Exhibition was
transferred from Pall Mall to Somerset
House, where it was destined to remain
until 1838, the year of its removal to the
National Gallery, where it stayed thirty-one
years on the way to Burlington House.
Among the portraits painted by the President
in that year was one of General Oglethorpe,
who, according to the “Table Talk”
of Samuel Rogers (quoted by Sir Walter
Armstrong), could tell of the days when he
had shot snipe in Conduit Street. In the
following year Reynolds painted the wonderful
picture of the Ladies Horatia, Laura,
and Maria Waldegrave, one of the few[Pg 57]
groups whose arrangement is beyond cavil.
Few will look in vain to that picture for
any of the finest qualities of Sir Joshua’s
art. He had very little to learn, though in
the summer and autumn of 1781 he visited
the Low Countries, staying in Bruges,
Brussels, The Hague, Amsterdam, and other
cities, and showing himself strangely indifferent
to the pictures of Franz Hals, though
these might have been presumed to appeal
to any portrait painter. His records and
impressions of the journey were set down
most carefully, and are preserved; they
show that success had not impaired discernment,
and that the painter was responsive
to most of the thoughts that stir educated
visitors to the Dutch galleries to-day.

In 1782, the year in which Romney painted
his first picture of Mistress Hart, afterwards
Lady Emma Hamilton, Reynolds sat to his[Pg 58]
great rival Gainsborough, now at the height
of his fame and in the last years of his life;
the two men disliked each other, and the
picture was never completed. Some say
that Reynolds made a hasty remark about
his fixed determination not to paint Gainsborough’s
portrait in return, and some
mischief-maker carried the words to Gainsborough.
Others think that the touch of
palsy or slight attack of paralysis that came
to Sir Joshua about the time of the sitting,
brought it to a close. There must be more
than this underlying the true story of the
affair, for though a visit to Brighton and
to Bath restored the President’s health, the
sittings were not resumed, even when Reynolds
wrote to say he was ready to sit again.
In 1783 Sir Joshua sent ten portraits to
the Academy, while Gainsborough, exhibiting
there for the last time, sent twenty-five
[Pg 61]
pictures, including the famous panels
of George III., and his children, now in
Windsor. But Reynolds added to his fame
in this year, for he painted the portrait of
Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse. Then
he paid another visit to the Low Countries,
to find with regret that Rubens’ appeal was
failing.

In the following year, 1784, Sir Joshua
sent sixteen pictures to the Academy, including
the famous Mrs. Siddons, Charles
James Fox, and Mrs. Abingdon as Roxalana.
Gainsborough had quarrelled with the R.A.
and exhibited no more, though he lived
until 1788. With December, Dr. Johnson’s
strenuous and useful life came to an end; he
passed away exhorting his old friend never
to paint on Sunday, and to read the Bible.
Reynolds has left a very interesting study
of the Doctor’s character. In the following[Pg 62]
year, the President went for the third time
to the Low Countries, and bought a number
of pictures; he also received the honour of
a commission from Catherine, Empress of
Russia, and painted the beautiful picture of
the Duchess of Devonshire and her baby
that hangs at Chatsworth to-day. Walpole
said, “it is little like, and not good,” but posterity
has declined to accept the verdict.
Sir Walter Armstrong considers that it
ranks with the “Lady Crosbie” and “Nelly
O’Brien” as the “most entirely successful
creations” of the artist. In ’87 the President
sent thirteen pictures to the Academy,
including the “Angel’s Heads” now in the
National Gallery. They are studies of
Frances Isabella Gordon, daughter of Lord
William Gordon, and the picture was given
to the Gallery in 1841. A year later, London
saw the picture that the Empress Catherine[Pg 63]
had commissioned, the subject is “The Infant
Hercules” and the canvas hangs in the Hermitage
Gallery at St. Petersburg. It is one
of the artist’s failures, and he received fifteen
hundred guineas for it. This is the date of
the famous Marlborough family group that
is to be seen at Blenheim.

A year later, when the President sent
some dozen pictures to the R.A., his activity
came to a sudden end. Some forty years
and more had passed since he painted the
first of his works that concerns us, and he
had not known an idle season. His record
would have brought honour to any three
men; he had lived as a philosopher should,
grateful for the gifts of the gods, and not
abusing any. Suddenly, in mid-July of 1789,
about the time of the fall of the Bastille,
one eye failed him as he worked at his
easel; he laid his brush aside. “All things[Pg 64]
have an end—I have come to mine,” he
remarked, with the quiet courage that never
deserted him, and he spent what remained
to him of life making gradual preparation
for the last day, sustained by memories of
the past through hours that were not always
free from pain and distress. Save for a
quarrel with the Academy, arising out of
the contest for membership between Bonomi
and Fuseli, there was nothing to disturb
the closing years of the old painter’s public
life, and even in this quarrel, he was the
victor. The General Assembly apologised,
and Reynolds withdrew his resignation,
though Chambers, now Sir William, was
obliged to act for him at Somerset House.
In December of 1790 Reynolds delivered
his final address to the students, the name
of Michelangelo being last upon his lips.
Little more than a year before he died, the[Pg 65]
President sat to the Swedish artist von
Breda, for a picture now in the Stockholm
Academy. West did his presidential work
for him in the last months of his life.

Many friends testify to the tranquillity of
these last days, though failing sight and the
deprivation of the liberal diet to which he
was accustomed had lowered the spirits
that were once bright as well as serene.
Perhaps modern medical science would have
availed to lengthen his life, and make the
last few years more worth living; but in
the eighteenth century one needed a very
sturdy constitution to endure the combined
attack of a disease and a doctor. Sir Joshua
was in his sixty-ninth year—he had lived in
the fullest sense all the time—and when one
evening in February 1792 Death came to
the House in Leicester Square, his visit
was quite expected, and was met with a[Pg 66]
tranquil mind. The body lay in state awhile
in the Royal Academy, and was then taken
to St. Paul’s Cathedral, and laid by the side
of Sir Christopher Wren. To-day we look
at the artist’s work with a critical eye—he
can no longer thrive by comparison with
contemporaries, but must compete with all
dead masters of portraiture; and it will be
admitted on every side that he holds his
own, that before every throne of judgment
his best works will plead for him and vindicate
the admiration of his countrymen.

It is not the least of his claims to high
consideration that his art moved steadily
forward, that the last work was the best.

IV

Naturally it is impossible within the limits
of a small and unpretentious monograph to
give an adequate idea of the range and[Pg 67]
variety of the labours that occupied Sir Joshua
Reynolds for half a century or more, and
no attempt will be made in this place to do
more than indicate the forces that seem to
have directed his brush, the masters whose
labour inspired it. It has been pointed out
in these pages that Reynolds was a great
assimilator. He took from everybody, but
he was always judicious, because, quite
apart from his executive faculties, he had
a critical gift of the first order. One has
but to turn to his diaries to realise that
his instinct was singularly sound. He could
stand before an admitted masterpiece and
enjoy all its beauties, without losing sight
of any defect however small, and because
his mind was beautifully balanced, the small
points of objection did not spoil his appreciation
of the whole work. They simply
taught him what he should avoid. In the[Pg 68]
very early days of his career, before he had
left Devonshire, he made the acquaintance
of one Gandy, an artist of some small repute,
whose father, also a painter, had studied
Van Dyck, and had taught his son to appreciate
the fine qualities of Rembrandt. The
younger Gandy afforded Reynolds his first
glimpse of the world lying beyond the reach
of the rank and file of British students, gave
him his earliest appreciation of Rembrandt,
and taught him to look for that master’s
work when he visited Rome. As soon as
Reynolds reached Italy, he examined the
great masters with a critical eye, and set
himself to copy Titian, Rubens, Rembrandt,
Guido, Raphael, and many others. He soon
saw that each of these masters had achieved
supreme success in some department of their
life’s work, and he had the idea of uniting
all the excellences that he saw around him,
[Pg 71]
and leaving the defects alone. He sought
for the colour of Rubens and Titian the
drawing of Raphael, the splendour of design
of Michelangelo, and the chiaroscuro of
Rembrandt. Naturally this must sound ambitious
enough; but we should remember that
Reynolds was far from standing alone in his
ambitions. Mengs, who did so much to proclaim
the merits of Velazquez and achieved a
great but temporary success as a painter in
Madrid before Goya’s wonderful gifts threw
him into well-merited obscurity, had the
same ideals, but whereas the best of his
accomplishments were but dull and short-lived,
Reynolds was able to force some way
through all the gifts with which he sought
to surround himself and to reach a style of
his own. The journey lasted very many
years, and the road is strewn with failures,
chiefly due to an inability to grasp the secret[Pg 72]
of a durable glaze and, like many men who
came before and after him, the painter had
to part company with some at least of his
ambitions. Had his own capacity for self-criticism
been less, had he allowed his feeling
for fine colour to prevail over the sound
judgment that bade him look for other and
more enduring excellencies, he would not
occupy the place he holds to-day, while on
the other hand, if a Titian or a Rubens had
been able to give him the secret of manipulating
pigments, he would have stood side
by side with the greatest masters of all
time.

Artists tell us that painting should be no
more than a harmony of colour and line, that
it should not attempt to cross the borderline
that separates painting from literature.
They are justified in their attitude, but at the
same time we cannot discuss painters in[Pg 73]
terms of paint, or tell of our admiration of
their work by expressing that admiration on
canvas. Those of us who are not painters,
can only approach art through literature, and
seek to find in a man the explanation of
his works, and in the works, the revelation of
the man.

Joshua Reynolds possessed a master
mind. He had wonderful capacity for synthesis
and analysis, and something akin to
the skilled physician’s gift of diagnosis. As
soon as he had built up the foundations of his
own art and found a new method of presentation,
he turned all his mental capacity to the
study of the people who sat for him. As
soon as he had achieved technique, the
other gifts that no technique could develop
came into play, and then his work revealed
its extraordinary qualities, side by side with
the few limitations that beset his mode of[Pg 74]
life. In society, Reynolds would seem to
have been courtly and reserved. He did not
expand to women as he did to men, for he
looked upon women and children as subjects
for classical treatment. He made them extremely
beautiful; he gave them graces and
gifts that flatter the imagination of those
who gaze upon his pictures to-day: but there
are not too many portraits of women among
those painted by Reynolds in which there is
a large quality of humanity. He suppresses a
great part of the human interest that may
have been in them, and replaces it with
beauty of colour and line. Now and again,
of course, he is very fortunate. When he
painted the great courtesans of his day, Polly
Fisher, Nelly O’Brien, and others of that frail
sisterhood, the qualities he omitted left the
sitters quite human. There was no suggestion
of the classic about them. A Nelly[Pg 75]
O’Brien at her best is just a woman, while
some of the high-born ladies at their best
became a little too cold, a little too stately,
a little too well-posed for the wicked world
they lived in. Even when we consider the
famous “Jumping Baby” that hangs at
Chatsworth, it is impossible to avoid the
thought that if the little one had really
been so happy and so playful, the mother’s
fine feathers must have been considerably
ruffled, and she must have made haste to
give the child back to the nurse.

His children, too, are seldom of this world.
Reynolds was a hardened old bachelor with
an eye for beauty. He had not studied
Bellini and Correggio for nothing, and many
of his little ones are far more like Italian
angels in modern dress than English boys
and girls. Of course there are notable
exceptions. “Master Crewe as Henry the[Pg 76]
Eighth” is delightfully English. “The
Strawberry Girl” is another picture painted
in hours of delightful inspiration, but “The
Age of Innocence,” for all its supreme
beauty, has a certain quality of conception
that is artificial. To look at Reynolds’ women
and children is to feel assured that the
painter lived a celibate life, and that the
stories about intrigues with Angelica Kaufmann
and others are misleading and unfounded.
We have but to turn to the work
of his great contemporaries, Gainsborough
and Romney, to see the difference between
women in whose veins the blood runs red,
and women who feed on nectar and ambrosia
and were never seen at a disadvantage in
their lives. It seems to the writer that
women and children were to Reynolds fit
and proper subjects for the exercise of his
gifts, but at the same time, folk in whom[Pg 77]
he had no abiding interest. Men interested
him, and when he turned the best of his
attention to them, he gave the world work
that will endure just as long as the pigments
he put down upon the canvas.

The picture of Admiral Keppel, hanging
to-day in the National Portrait Gallery, was
the first ripe fruit of the painter’s Italian
journey, and had produced in the world
of art something akin to a sensation.
Thereafter Reynolds stood alone as the
representative eighteenth-century painter of
great men. His rivals could not approach
him there. He seemed to see right into the
heart and brain of the men who sat for
him, to realise clearly and judiciously the
part they were playing in life, and he strove
to set it down in such a fashion that the
character and capacities of the sitter should
impress themselves at once upon those who[Pg 78]
saw the portrait. Other painters might give
one aspect of a man, but Reynolds’ vision
was far larger—it was completely comprehensive;
when he had dealt with a subject,
it was well-nigh impossible to approach it
again, save in the way of imitation. There
was a finality about the treatment that
must have baffled and exasperated his rivals.
The portraits of Charles James Fox, David
Garrick, Laurence Sterne, to name a few,
are masterly in their simplicity, in the
directness of their appeal, and in the splendid
expression of character through features.
To satisfy the claims of Reynolds’ brush it
was absolutely necessary that his sitters
should have character, even if it was a bad
one. That is why the portraits of courtesans
arouse attention in fashion that women
whose characters were undeveloped either for
good or for evil will never succeed in doing.[Pg 79]

It is not always easy to realise what
Reynolds’ work was like at its best, because
so many of his canvases have either
lost their original tints or have suffered the
final indignity of restoration. In his search
after the secret of the Venetians he made
many elaborate experiments at the expense
of his sitters, and pictures that were remarkable
in their year for colour that
aroused the enthusiasm of connoisseurs
grew old even sooner than the sitters. His
solid foundations decomposed, the surface
colour of many a celebrity is now as pale
as the sitter’s own ghost may be supposed
to be. Here there is perhaps some excuse
for looking at Reynolds’ work from the
literary standpoint, because though the
harmony of line may remain, the harmony
of colour has gone beyond recall, and there
are some at least of Reynolds’ pictures in[Pg 80]
which the colour, had it been preserved,
would have been the most effective quality.
At times the great artist’s draughtsmanship
was far removed from excellence. And
yet when criticism has said its last word,
the name and fame of Sir Joshua Reynolds
will remain the pride of British art and the
admiration of the civilised world.

The plates are printed by Bemrose Dalziel, Ltd., Watford
The text at the Ballantyne Press, Edinburgh