Randall Davies

“ To us the easy pose of the figure standing beside the horse is only a source of enjoyment, and we feel as it were that there could have been no other possible way of painting the portrait with any success; that that was the one attitude in which Captain Orme appeared to any advantage. We recognise in it the work of a great master without any question as to its place in the history of painting. ”

“ That this determination to look at his art in the broadest possible spirit was the dominant factor in his success is continually evident at every point in his career. The breadth and sincerity of this view are so faithfully reflected in every single work he achieved that it seems rather to character than to genius that he owes his high place among painters. ”

“ Looking back, as we now may, over the whole extent of British painting in the eighteenth century, we may say still more than this, namely that while others practised the profession of painting Reynolds dignified it. Painting in England had never been an art, it was little more than a business; and there was small hope of it ever becoming anything better when a really considerable painter like Kneller was content simply to fill his pockets from the profits of an emporium for fashionable portraits without caring in the least as to their quality so long as he got his price. ”

“ Instead of copying the touches of those great masters, copy only their conceptions; instead of treading in their footsteps, endeavour only to keep the same road; labour to invent on their general principles and way of thinking; possess yourself with their spirit; consider with yourself how a Michel Angelo or a Raphael would have treated this subject, and work yourself into a belief that your picture is to be seen and criticised by them when completed ”

“ As to the methods by which this ignorance was to be overcome, it is to be observed that when lecturing at the Academy in his later days Sir Joshua was constantly urging upon the students the necessity for generalisation. “The man of true genius,” he says,{15} “instead of spending all his hours, as many artists do while they are at Rome, in measuring statues and copying pictures, soon begins to think for himself, and endeavours to do something like what he sees. I consider general copying a delusive kind of industry.” ”

“ Dignity, it may be observed, is a dangerous quality when not accompanied, or alloyed, by others more human. If not nicely balanced it is only too liable to swerve to pomposity on the one hand, or empty affability or condescension on the other. That Reynolds never swayed perceptibly in either direction it would hardly be true to assert. His pedantic observations on his great contemporaries, Hogarth, Gainsborough and Wilson, and the patronising tone of some of his conversations with the younger men, would be less forgivable were it not that one realises how great a man he was. ”

“ But his success was now not far off, and with the full-length portrait of Keppel, which was painted in 1753, he sprang into fame.
“With this picture,” says Farington, in his Memoir of Reynolds published in 1819, “he took great pains; for it was observed at the time that after several sittings he defaced his work and began again. But his labour was not lost; that excellent production was so much admired that it completely established the reputation of the artist. Its dignity and spirit, its beauty of colour and fine general effect occasioned equal surprise and pleasure. ”

“ With Nelly O’Brien we know that he dined, and the only reason to suppose that he was not on easy terms of familiarity with any of them—if it can be called a reason—is the general dignity of his mind and deportment, as evidenced by his relations with Dr. Johnson, the Burney family, and all the great and learned people of his time. The main thing, however,{42} to be considered is that as an artist he made no difference between the virtuous and the frail. That he was paid for painting them need hardly be mentioned, as that has nothing whatever to do with the question. ”

“ We may smile at Whistler’s naïve “Why drag in Velasquez?” but in the “originality” of Reynolds’s Commodore Keppel and Captain Orme we see no more than the fruits of a great mind fertilised by the continuous study of Vandyck and the Italian masters. In a gallery of the great portraits of the world, these achievements of Reynolds would fall as naturally into line with those of the older masters as the regular{32} productions of the fashionable portrait painters of to-day assimilate with the thousands of pictures amongst which they are hung upon the walls of the Royal Academy. ”

“ It is true that Hogarth had lately wrought several wonderfully vigorous achievements in unconventional portraiture, one or two of which—notably the Bishop of Winchester—are to be seen in an adjoining room at the National Gallery. But Hogarth was never a portrait painter, and admirable as his peculiar qualities were, to compare him with Reynolds is very much like comparing a blacksmith with a sculptor. ”

“ I was always willing to believe that my uncertainty of proceeding in my works—that is, my never being sure of my hand, and my frequent alterations—arose from a refined taste which could not acquiesce in anything short of a high degree of excellence. ”

“ The Dean of Gloucester had said on the occasion of a meeting of the Society of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, that he thought a pinmaker was a more useful and valuable{19} member of society than Raphael. Reynolds was of the contrary opinion, which he committed to paper:
“This is an observation of a very narrow mind; a mind that is confined to the mere object of commerce; that sees with a microscopic eye but a part of the great machine of the economy of life, and thinks that small part which he sees to be the whole.
“Commerce is the means, not the end, of happiness or pleasure. ”

“ But, when all have been fairly considered, it is to Reynolds that the highest tribute is due for having helped, by precept as well as by practice, to raise the arts from the low estate in which he found them at the outset of his career to the proud position in which they stood at the close of the eighteenth century. ”

“ Nothing can exceed the brilliancy of light, the force and vigorous effect ... it possesses all that we look for and are accustomed to admire in Rembrandt, united to beautiful forms and to an elevation of mind to which Rembrandt had no pretensions ”

“ Shallow and slipshod imitation soon became the fashionable cloak to cover the bare bones of the old skeleton—ignorance—and the early Victorian age could produce nothing in the way of portraiture which is now looked at without contempt. ”

“ Let us now turn to the other two—Lady Elizabeth Keppel and Lady Caroline Russell—as the prototypes of his more usual portraits of ladies, the whole and the half-length.
A complete full-length picture of a woman offers more difficulties of pose, proportion, light, colour, or any other particular, than are overcome by any but a few of the greatest painters. ”

“ That he was an Englishman is a fact which nowadays it may seem unnecessary to emphasise. But how easy it is to forget that a very considerable number of the painters whose works are included in those of “the British School” were not born in England. That the very greatest of all were natives—namely, Reynolds, Gainsborough, Hogarth, Romney, Lawrence, Constable and Turner—is certainly gratifying to the national pride; and it may be added that with the exception of Romney all of these were born south of the Trent. ”

“ Johnson wrote, “is chiefly exerted in historical pictures, and the art of the painter of portraits is often lost in the obscurity of the subject. But it is in painting as in life: what is greatest is not{18} always best. I should grieve to see Reynolds transfer to heroes and to goddesses, to empty splendour and to airy fiction, that art which is now employed in diffusing friendship, in renewing tenderness, in quickening the affections of the absent and continuing the presence of the dead. Every man is always present to himself, and has therefore little need of his own resemblance ”

“ Never was an aristocracy more fortunate in their painter.
But youth and beauty and the immortality conferred by Sir Joshua were not exclusive privileges of the nobility. To Lord Mount Edgcumbe and Captain Keppel, Reynolds owed the beginning of his patronage in Court circles, but to the latter he was also indebted for the acquaintance of one of his fairest sitters, Kitty Fisher, the daughter of a German staymaker, who was the most celebrated Traviata of her time. ”

“ This striving after generalisation, seeing things whole, is noticed by Edmund Burke as almost the chief characteristic of Reynolds’s genius. Malone requested Burke to “throw his thoughts on paper relative to Sir Joshua,” at the time when he was preparing his Life, and Burke complied with the request in the following short summary, which is printed in Leslie and Taylor’s Life of Sir Joshua.
“He was a great generaliser, and was fond of reducing everything to one system; more, perhaps, than the variety of principles which operate in the human mind, and in every human work, will properly endure. ”

“ From such an abundance of material, to say nothing of modern publications, it is hardly possible to collect everything that is of value within the limits of a short memoir. Only such points as are in themselves essential, or seem significant in relation to the enormous influence of Reynolds on his contemporaries, has it been attempted to dwell upon. ”

“ SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS When Benjamin West, a native of Pennsylvania, was elected President of the Royal Academy, on the death of Reynolds in 1792, he found the arts in a state of prosperity which could hardly have been predicted when Reynolds began painting in London just half a century earlier. ”

“ The fascination{38} that Gainsborough’s natural genius throws over his admirers—and Reynolds himself was not entirely unaffected by it—is apt to blind them to the more solid merit of the other, and the fact that Reynolds had achieved so much before Gainsborough had really started painting portraits is apt to be overlooked. In 1751, when Sir Joshua had fairly established his reputation, Gainsborough had only just left his native place and settled in Bath, and it was not until 1774—twenty-one years after Reynolds—that he came to London and seriously competed with him for the public favour. ”

“ As the work of a country youth of twenty-three this is certainly a very remarkable performance. Hogarth and some of his minor contemporaries were at this date producing “conversation pieces” of more or less merit, but we must look to Holland or France for anything on this scale. Only once again did Reynolds attempt anything approaching so comprehensive a survey of family portraiture on a single canvas, namely the Marlborough group at Blenheim, containing eight figures besides several dogs, of which a very spirited little sketch in oils is now in the National Gallery. ”

“ Besides the exhibition of pictures in the April of the year 1761, when the Captain Orme and the Lord Ligonier opened the public eyes in wonder at the achievements of the new painter, the marriage and coronation of King George III in September contributed, incidentally, to advance{34} the reputation of Reynolds in the portraiture of women. Of the ten noble and lovely bridesmaids who bore the train of the Queen, three of the most beautiful were painted by him in this year, namely, the Ladies Caroline Russell, Elizabeth Keppel, and Sarah Lenox. ”

“ Mason was, besides, an amateur painter, and was always admitted to Sir Joshua’s painting room unless he had a sitter for a portrait. When not so occupied, he tells us, Reynolds was always retouching an old master, or had some beggar or poor child sitting to him, because he always chose to have nature before his eyes. Mason mentions the effect of the portrait of Keppel in attracting others to Reynolds, among the first being the young Lords Huntingdon and Stormont, who had just returned from the grand tour. ”

“ Besides these capital works there are memoirs by Joseph Farington, R.A., by Edmund Malone, by William Cotton, by William Mason, and by Allan Cunningham in his “Lives of the British Painters,” all of which appeared in the earlier half of the last century. ”

“ To sit for her portrait was now no longer a duty to her family, a bore, or at best a mere vanity, but a thrill.
Mrs. Bonfoy, one of the daughters of Lord Eliot in the family group of 1746, was among the first to experience it, sitting to Reynolds again for a half-length in 1754. This portrait is still at Port Eliot, and is described by Leslie as “one of his most beautiful female portraits, and in perfect preservation. ”