Text c. Joshua Reynolds

The conversation piece indeed remained throughout the century a style of informal composition productive of happy results, though in the person of Joshua Reynolds (1723-92) we once again find English painting attempting to rise to a grander level and resuming the contact with the continental tradition from which Hogarth had declared his independence. It was Reynolds's aim to raise the status of English art not, in Hogarth's fashion, by insular defiance but by a superiority of knowledge and ambition.

It seems a necessary part of his destiny that after a period spent as pupil of the portrait painter Thomas Hudson, Reynolds as a young man should have had the chance of visiting Italy and in a stay of over three years acquired that acquaintance with the works of the great Italian masters, in Rome mainly but also in Venice, which played so large a part in the formation of his philosophy of art and, in some degree, of his style. It seems equally a matter of destiny that in the years of success and prestige which followed his return to London the idea of an Academy, so long discussed, should at last find fruition and royal acknowledgement and that it should provide the incentive to give his thoughts on art a precise literary form. To understand his outlook it is necessary to refer, not only to his paintings but to the Discourses which as first President of the Royal Academy he addressed to the students year by year, constructing an orderly philosophic system, establishing a hierarchy of great masters and extracting from their example the essential qualities of the 'Grand Style'.

The argument, with its insistence on the general as opposed to the particular, the need to correct the accidents and 'particularities' of nature and to profit by the example of the masters of the Italian Renaissance, was the reverse of Hogarth's ideas and an implicit criticism of his art. How did Reynolds apply it in his own painting? As he was primarily a portrait painter, one might conclude that much of his exposition of the Grand Style was irrelevant. History painting of a religious or classical kind was as much outside his scope as that of Hogarth. Reynolds indeed had many English traits which his principles would deprecate – a humour for instance which appears in some caricature portraits executed in Rome, and, though early corrected, is still discernible in such a work as his Garrick between Comedy and Tragedy; a strong sense of individual character; a sentiment which appears in his pictures of children.

He was, however, able to assemble from European precedent not from Italian masters alone (and certainly not from Michelangelo whom he admired most of all), but from Rembrandt, Rubens, Van Dyck, and the Venetians, a style which had a grandeur of its own. It is well exemplified in the truly majestic Self-Portrait, in which he stands, in the robes of a DCL, the degree conferred on him by Oxford in 1773, by a bust of Michelangelo. The conception is deliberately based, not on Italian models but on Rembrandt's Aristotle contemplating the bust of Homer.

In the richness of colour inspired by great European models, Reynolds is outstanding, not only in mellow warmth such as pervades the portrait of Lord Heathfield but in a flexible variety as may be seen in the delicacies of blue and grey to be found in the delightful Nelly O'Brien. A technical carelessness and an experimental desire for a heightened richness, led him to use bitumen, that radioactive pitch which has darkened and ruined some of his works, but those unaffected show him as a subtle and masterly colourist.

The Grand Style element in Reynolds's portraiture sometimes gives the impression of a theatrical or even playful adjunct, as in the group of the Montgomery sisters as Three Ladies adorning a Term of Hymen. It is refined, however, into an atmosphere of distinction in the magnificent series of single figures in which, more than any other painter, he gives a personal history of his age and such a survey of English character as no one since Holbein had been able to realize. He has impressed on the mind of later times the characteristic image of illustrious contemporaries, Dr Johnson, Laurence Sterne, Oliver Goldsmith, Gibbon, Burke, Fox, Garrick, Mrs Siddons. In his paintings of children he is entirely natural and unaffected. When all is said and done, it is informality to which he tended in his later work and not a rigidity of doctrine.