Joshua Reynolds
The leader of the British Academy.
Joshua Reynolds was the first President of the Royal Academy. He painted portraits in a “Grand Manner” based on ancient and Italian models.
Joshua Reynolds was born in 1723 in Plympton in Devon. His father was a clergyman and schoolmaster. At seventeen he was apprenticed to the portrait painter Thomas Hudson in London. The decisive step came in 1749, when he was able to sail with a warship to the Mediterranean. He stayed in Italy for about three years and studied Raphael, Michelangelo and the Venetian masters. There he also began to have problems with his hearing and later had to use an ear trumpet.
Back in London he made his name with a full-length portrait of his friend Commodore Augustus Keppel (1752–53), which shows him striding along a stormy shore. The painting is in the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. Reynolds soon became England's leading portrait painter. When the Royal Academy was founded in 1768 he was elected its first President, and the following year he was knighted. Among his best-known works is Mrs Siddons as the Tragic Muse (1784), now in the Huntington Library in California.
Reynolds wanted to raise the standing of portrait painting. He gave his sitters poses taken from ancient statues and Italian masters, a so-called “Grand Manner”. A noblewoman could be painted as a goddess and a general as an ancient hero. In his fifteen lectures, the Discourses on Art, he taught students to study the old masters and seek the universal. The lectures became a foundational text for art teaching for more than a hundred years. Technically he experimented a great deal, and many of his paintings have unfortunately cracked or faded.
Reynolds never married. His sister kept house for him for many years. He was a central figure in London's intellectual life and founded a club with friends such as the writer Samuel Johnson. He was known as a wise and diplomatic man, but his rivalry with Gainsborough was well known. In 1789 he lost the sight of one eye and stopped painting. He died in 1792 and was buried in St Paul's Cathedral.
Reynolds shaped the British art establishment. Not everyone was enthusiastic: William Blake wrote angry notes in the margins of his Discourses, and the Pre-Raphaelites mockingly called him “Sir Sloshua”. Even so, his portraits hang in every major British collection.