James Mason

“ For many men the rapid success would not have been good, they would have ceased to strive and would have been content to repeat themselves, but Joshua Reynolds, with his high ideals and genuine enthusiasm for work, was only stimulated by prosperity; it was powerless to spoil him. While his work was increasing in power he was selecting friends from the ranks of the most distinguished scholars and thinkers in town, and while his labours were making him a bigger artist, the association with great intellects was making him a bigger man. ”

“ Sir Joshua was not the only man to succumb to her charms; in years to come Goethe himself was to acknowledge them. It is pleasant to think that whatever the great painter's private affairs may have been, they have remained private for all time. What a wealth of moralising this condition has enabled us to escape! We are left to concern ourselves solely with his progress as artist and as man, and there is quite enough in this as may be gathered from study of the artist's leading biographers. ”

“ To the man who has never held a paint brush as well as to the novice in art and the old experienced hand, there is a definite appeal. He shows one and all that his triumph as a portrait painter is not a mere affair of happy chance, but the logical outcome of certain principles followed without concession. ”

“ How pleasant it is to remember that Nature so careless of the individual is so careful of the type that it blossoms anew with every generation!
Having written, however briefly, of the children in Reynolds' picture, it seems unnecessary to say more of his charm; they will stand for it until the end comes, the hour when the pigments can endure no longer and the labour of the master is ended.
There is little to add to the story of Sir Joshua after he became President of the Royal Academy. ”

“ The modern market carefully nursed by a ring of astute professionals will give almost any price for portraits of fair women by Sir Joshua, though it may be suggested that his greatest success was in the treatment of men or at least that he saw far more in men than in women. But Reynolds had not studied classic figures for nothing, he could give his fair sitters some suggestion of direct association with those goddesses of old time whom he had admired in Italy, and to this treatment no exception was taken. It is very rarely that Reynolds makes his women human. ”

“ When we consider the ill fortune of the Incorporated Society and the Society of Artists and remember how actively men intrigued then, as now, it is not difficult to see that the Royal Academy owes a heavy debt to Sir Joshua, who may be said to have nursed it with the greatest care during its infancy and was such a generous contributor to the walls of its annual exhibition that he is said to have sent nearly two hundred and fifty pictures during his term of office. ”

“ But the lad's talent developed early, his hands were busy with the pencil at a very early age, and at a time when to most lads reading is a labour rather than a pastime, he was mastering the elements of perspective and studying a "Theory of Painting" by one Richardson. This precocious interest in art was not to be overlooked, and the Rev. Samuel Reynolds giving up the idea of the medical profession for his son, sent him in his seventeenth year to London as pupil to a portrait painter named Thomas Hudson, a man of some temporary repute. ”

“ Nellie O'Brien, whose portrait hangs in the Wallace Collection, is one of the exceptions, and an attempt is made to make the "Duchess of Devonshire and Child," now at Chatsworth, equally feminine, but one cannot escape the thought that the mother's gesture as expressed on the canvas is altogether exceptional. She could not have played for long with such a strong healthy baby without ruffling the delightful costume or the carefully arranged hair, and this, one feels, would have been unendurable. ”

“ Sir Walter Armstrong, Sir Claude Phillips among the moderns, and Northcote and Leslie and Taylor among those nearer to the artist, are men who have left little for those who endeavour to glean in the field of biography. They have done more than write the story of one man's life—they have given us a valuable glimpse of contemporary history. It is a grateful task to write at considerable length of Sir Joshua, because of his association with so many leaders of contemporary thought and action. ”

“ Londoners mourned when Reynolds' life came to an end, and they buried him with much pomp and ceremony by the side of Sir Christopher Wren. But he may well be content with the measure of his own immortality. No British portrait painter has seriously challenged his supremacy, and few may hope to rival his output. The Graves and Cronin catalogue mention three thousand pictures and probably leave well over a thousand unnamed. It is possible for the amateur to name a hundred examples of his portraiture, any of which would have justified a claim to posthumous honours. ”

“ Successful as he was in expressing the moods of men and the fascination of women, it is impossible in writing of the charm of Reynolds to forget the part the children play in his work. It would be hard indeed to find a painter who has expressed the joy and happiness of childhood with equal effect. Some of the children so depicted are seen with their mothers, and one feels that the portrait was painted more for the mother than for the child ”

“ To many people Reynolds is known best as the first President of the Royal Academy, and it is necessary in dealing, however briefly, with the story of his life to point out how the Academy came into being. Down to the middle of the eighteenth century exhibitions of modern work would appear to have been unknown. London's interest in fine arts was strictly limited. People with plenty of money hired an artist to paint their portrait much as we should hire a painter and decorator to put a house in good order. Artists had comparatively little standing and no representative institution ”

“ He has preserved for us all that was notable—statesmen, soldiers, sailors, churchmen, men of letters, actors, fair women, frail women, delightful children—they are all there, and if we cannot see them all quite in their habit as they lived, there is enough left to give a very fair idea. ”

“ Perhaps the best praise to be given to these discourses on art is the reminder that they are still in steady demand, indeed, they are the most accessible guide to their author's methods. His grasp of principles, his breadth of view and critical insight are all the more attractive because of the ease and fluency with which they are expressed. ”

“ It is well to remember that Sir Joshua was not a heaven-sent genius, and that he arrived at the perfection of his achievement by the addition of hard labour to a considerable natural gift. He started out with few advantages save those that come to the young man who finds a patron early in life ”

“ The Charm of Reynolds
I. HIS ART AND CHARACTER
Portraits painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds are a national asset, and appeal to the general public in this light almost as strongly as they appeal to the smaller section that takes a definite interest in pictures. The value of the portraits varies considerably; it is probable that the artist produced between four and five thousand in his time, sometimes completing three or four in a week for years on end, and even in his more leisured times producing six or seven per month, so it was of course inevitable that their value should not be equal. ”

“ The man was a sturdy Briton, he worked hard all the days of his life, he had a large measure of shrewd common sense, great gifts, high ideals, and sufficient human weakness to make him what the Spaniards call "hombre como alquier otro," a man like any other. ”

“ Many moderns will not see eye to eye with him, they may ever hold that he was quite mistaken in many of his views, but the change of fashion and the modification of thought are of less importance than the fact that Sir Joshua accepted, followed, and taught certain theories and lived in the light of them. ”

“ The Society of Artists received in 1765 a certificate of Incorporation from King George III., and became the Incorporated Society of Artists of Great Britain with a membership of more than two hundred. ”