Part 1

REYNOLDS

UNIFORM WITH THIS VOLUME

ROMNEY

Containing sixteen examples of the master’s work

VELASQUEZ

Containing sixteen examples of the master’s work

A. AND C. BLACK, 4 SOHO SQUARE, LONDON, W.

REYNOLDS

BY RANDALL DAVIES

CONTAINING SIXTEEN EXAMPLES IN COLOUR OF THE MASTER’S WORK

LONDON ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK 1913

PRINTED AT THE BALLANTYNE PRESS LONDON

PREFACE

The chief authorities on the life and work of Reynolds are James Northcote, R.A., his most successful pupil; Henry William Beechey, and C. R. Leslie, R.A., each of whom produced a two-volume work on the subject. The first of these appeared in 1819, seventeen years after Sir Joshua’s death; the next in 1835, and the last, edited by Tom Taylor, in 1865.

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.

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.

R. D.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

1. Miss Nelly O’Brien (1763) _Wallace Collection, London_ _Frontispiece_

_Facing p._ 2. Captain Orme (1761) _National Gallery, London_ 2

3. The Strawberry Girl (1773) _Wallace Collection, London_ 4

4. Lady Cockburn and Her Children (1773) _National Gallery, London_ 6

5. Miss Bowles (1775) _Wallace Collection, London_ 8

6. Portrait of Two Gentlemen (1778) _National Gallery, London_ 12

7. Mrs. Carnac (1778) _Wallace Collection, London_ 16

8. Lady and Child (1780 ?) _National Gallery, London_ 20

9. Admiral Keppel (1780) “ “ “ 22

10. Mrs. Hoare and Child (1783 ?) _Wallace Collection, London_ 24

11. Mrs. Robinson (“Perdita”) (1784 ?) “ “ “ 28

12. Lord Heathfield (1787) _National Gallery, London_ 36

13. The Age of Innocence (1788) “ “ “ 44

14. Mrs. Braddyl (1788 or 1789) _Wallace Collection, London_ 46

15. Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse (1789) _Dulwich Gallery_ 48

16. Mrs. Nesbit with a Dove _Wallace Collection, London_ 52

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. To attribute this happy improvement to his illustrious predecessor alone would have been more than was fair to West himself, and in giving to Sir Joshua the fullest credit for his share in it, the claims of one or two great painters and of more lesser lights than can readily be counted must not be overlooked. 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. “He was the first Englishman,” said Edmund Burke, “who added the praise of the elegant arts to the other glories of his country.”

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.

Kneller, however, was a German. What was wanted for English Art was an Englishman. Sir James Thornhill, and his forceful son-in-law, William Hogarth, were both bold and successful in attempting what they could, each in his particular way, to root the plant in the soil. But neither had the necessary combination of those two qualities, greatness and dignity, which was essential for effecting so great a task as bringing the plant to maturity. Thornhill had the dignity without the greatness, Hogarth something of the greatness without the

dignity; and it was left to Reynolds, in whom these two qualities, abundantly evident, were blended in such nice proportions, to foster, if not to found, one of the most vigorous schools of painting that the world has ever seen.

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. There are many passages in his Discourses that, taken by themselves, are apt to exasperate; but when we consider the work he actually accomplished, the example he afforded, and the knowledge of his art which by his application he added to his natural gifts, we cannot fail to see how paramount his influence has been on the whole course of English Art in his own and succeeding times.

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. Scotland has given us Raeburn, and Wales Richard Wilson. But with the exception of the miniaturists, Isaac and Peter Oliver, Nicholas Hilyard and Samuel Cooper, there was no English artist of note before the eighteenth century; the influence of Holbein, Vandyke, Lely, Kneller, and the rest who worked in England, was never strong enough to awaken a response in the country of their adoption. In later and modern times the British School has been enriched from various quarters: by West, Copley, Whistler, Abbey, and Sargent from across the Atlantic; by Alma Tadema from Holland and Hubert von Herkomer from Germany, to mention only a few of the more notable names. But the

number of British artists is now so great, to say nothing of their strength, that these accessions count for little in the great stream whose fountainhead, to return to the point from which we start, was Joshua Reynolds.

It was at Plympton in Devonshire that Reynolds was born, on July 16, 1723. His father, the Rev. Samuel Reynolds, was headmaster of a school in the parish. His mother’s maiden name was Theophila Potter. He was the tenth of eleven children--no uncommon number for a country parson in England. He is said to have been called Joshua in expectation of possible benevolence from an uncle of that name who lived in the neighbourhood. Perhaps this was an afterthought, for his name is entered in the register of baptisms at Plympton as Joseph.

Like many, if not most, of his fellow-geniuses he developed a taste for the arts at a very early age. His father, with that lack of foresight which may almost be called a characteristic of parents, is known to have endorsed one of his sons earliest efforts, executed during school-hours, “Done by Joshua out of pure idleness.” “His first essays,” Malone tells us, “were copying some slight drawings made by two of his sisters, who had a turn for art; he afterwards eagerly copied such prints as he met with among his father’s books, particularly those which were given in the translation of Plutarch’s lives published by Dryden. But his principal fund of imitation was Jacob Catts’s Book of Emblems, which his great-grandmother by the father’s side, a Dutchwoman, had brought with her from Holland.”

Trivial as these anecdotes of early efforts may in very many cases be held, it is here of the very greatest interest to compare the beginnings of Reynolds’s genius with those of his only formidable rival, Gainsborough. For in both we so plainly see “the child the father of the man” that, were it not that we have both of the accounts on sufficiently trustworthy authority, we might well suppose them to have been supplied merely to feed the popular imagination of what ought to have been. “A beautiful wood of four miles in extent,” Allan Cunningham tells us, “was Gainsborough’s first inspiration when but a child, in Suffolk. Scenes are pointed out where he used to sit and fill his copy-books with pencillings of flowers, and trees, and whatever pleased his fancy; and it is said that these early attempts of the child bore a distinct

resemblance to the mature works of the man. At ten years old he had made some progress in sketching, and at twelve he was a confirmed painter.”

Reynolds’s father was not long, however, in awaking to Joshua’s talents, for the boy was not more than about eight years old when, after perusing a book entitled “The Jesuit’s Perspective,” he made a drawing of Plympton School which effected a complete revolution in the state of the parental mind. “This is what the author of the ‘Perspective’ asserts in his preface,” cried the worthy father, “that by observing the rules laid down in this book a man may do wonders--for this is wonderful!”

After this portentous revelation Joshua was allowed to devote himself more seriously to his favourite pursuit, and his classical studies were sacrificed to the more congenial occupation of drawing likenesses of his relations and friends, and to the perusal of Richardson’s treatise on painting, which gave him his first acquaintance with the beauties of the great Italian Masters.

To the author of this work, Jonathan Richardson the elder, some slight tribute is due in speaking of the formation and development of the English School of Painting, so far at all events as it was influenced by the study of the Italian Masters. Horace Walpole considered him one of the best painters of a head that had appeared in this country. “There is strength, roundness, and boldness in his colouring,” he says, “but his men want dignity and his women grace. The good sense of the nation is characterised in his portraits. You see he lived in an age when neither enthusiasm nor servility were predominant.” The treatise of Richardson in which Reynolds formed his first acquaintance with the Italian Masters was probably the “Essay on the whole Art of Criticism as it relates to Painting,” which was published in 1719, bound up in one volume with “An Argument in behalf of the Science of a Connoisseur.” This was followed, in 1722, by an account of some of the statues, bas-reliefs, drawings, and pictures in Italy, &c., with remarks by Mr. Richardson, Senior and Junior. The son made the journey, and from his notes they both compiled this valuable work. The father formed a large collection of the drawings of Old Masters, many of which were acquired and treasured by Reynolds.

When he was eighteen years old, Reynolds was sent to London to study painting under Thomas Hudson, the most successful portrait painter at that

time, with whom he remained for two years. It is said that the relations between master and pupil were not very happy, and that the reason for Reynolds’s abrupt return to Devonshire was the success of one of his portraits which had been hung by accident among Hudson’s productions. However this may be, it appears that Reynolds had not wasted his time in London, and it was during the next two or three years, when he had returned to his native country and settled at Plymouth, that he painted the portrait of himself (with his palette in his left hand, shading his eyes with his right), besides being commissioned to paint Miss Chudleigh, afterwards the notorious Duchess of Kingston, and the Commissioner of Plymouth Dock.

Northcote speaks of Reynolds’s pictures at this early period as being “carelessly drawn and frequently in commonplace attitudes, like those of his old master Hudson, with one hand hid in the waistcoat, and the hat under the arm--a very favourite attitude with portrait painters at that time, because particularly convenient to the artist, as by it he got rid of the tremendous difficulty of painting the hand.” Apropos of which Northcote proceeds to relate an anecdote which he says he had heard so often and on such authority that he apprehended it to be a truth:

“One gentleman whose portrait Reynolds had painted desired to have his hat on his head in the picture, which was quickly finished, in a commonplace attitude, done without much study, and sent home; where, on inspection, it was soon discovered that although this gentleman in his portrait had one hat upon his head, yet there was another under his arm.”

A fine specimen of his accomplishments at this early period is a small “conversation piece”--that is to say, an elaborate family group, painted in the year 1746, which is now in the possession of Lord St. Germans, at Port Eliot, near Plymouth. I have not seen the original, but Mr. George Harland Peck has a small version of it in water-colour, which he was kind enough to allow me to reproduce in the Portfolio Monograph No. 48 (“English Society of the Eighteenth Century in Contemporary Art”). In this composition there are no less than eleven figures, grouped in various attitudes about the steps at a corner of the family mansion. The central figure, standing, is Edward, afterwards created Lord Eliot. On his left are seated his father and mother, Richard and Harriot Eliot. On his right are standing two of his sisters, and Captain Hamilton (ancestor of the Duke of Abercorn) with a child on his shoulders. A boy on his right, two children seated in the foreground, and a Mrs. Goldsworthy on the extreme right of the picture complete the composition.

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.

But Reynolds’s greatest good fortune at Plymouth, as it afterwards proved, was his introduction to Lord Mount Edgcumbe, who became his most valuable patron when he returned to London, and to Captain Keppel, whose kindness enabled him to visit Italy instead of settling down as a provincial portrait painter, with nothing better by way of example than the hopeless decadence that followed as a natural consequence on the slovenly indifference of Kneller. In 1749 Keppel was appointed Commodore of the Mediterranean station, and invited Reynolds to accompany him. He willingly accepted the invitation, and remained in Italy for over three years. How he profited by this opportunity for studying the works of the greatest masters may be gathered from numerous passages in his memoranda and in the “Discourses;” and to discover the secret of his success, both in practice and in precept, we have only to read in his own words the story of the ceaseless activity of a mind unalterably bent on utilising every opportunity for improving his art. Let us begin with the passage in which he confesses to have found himself disappointed with the works of Raphael. “I did not for a moment conceive or suppose,” he writes, “that the name of Raphael and those admirable paintings in particular owed their reputation to the ignorance and prejudice of mankind; on the contrary, my not relishing them as I was conscious I ought to have done was one of the most humiliating circumstances that ever happened to me: I found myself in the midst of works executed upon principles with which I was unacquainted; I felt my ignorance and stood abashed.

“All the indigested notions of painting which I had brought with me from England, where art was in

the lowest state it had ever been in (it could not, indeed, be lower), were to be totally done away and eradicated from my mind. It was necessary, as it is expressed on a very solemn occasion, that I should become _as a little child_.”

Ignorance, then, was the first obstacle to be overcome. It was ignorance, as Beechey so truly points out in the introduction to his Memoir of Reynolds, ignorance of the dignity and creative powers of art, that made the works of his predecessors inferior to those of modern times; and it was the light derived from intellectual sources, operating upon a powerful and discriminating mind, that enabled him to attain a higher degree of excellence. “We may fairly assume,” Beechey continues, “that the productions of this admirable painter gave the first great stimulus to British art and showed to British artists the extent of their deficiencies and the means by which they might be remedied ... but we may venture to affirm that if he had never enjoyed the opportunities of comparing the results of his early education with the works of Italian genius, he would never have attained that high superiority which is now so universally allowed to him ... it was the study of those principles on which Raphael and Michel Angelo had formed their comprehensive and elevated views of nature which first enabled Reynolds to perceive his own deficiencies, to appreciate the value of intellectual art, and to employ it in dignifying that of his country.”

This was written, be it observed, in 1835, at a time when the art of portraiture was fast descending from the heights to which Reynolds, Gainsborough and Romney had raised it to depths almost as low as those in which it had sunk a century earlier. Hoppner and Lawrence, the last of the great men, had left no one to carry on the tradition, and had contributed in some measure to its extinction by faults of manner which were fatally easy to imitate. 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.

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, “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.” And again, “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; even an attempt of this kind will rouse your powers.”

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. That it was not so may be readily admitted when we remember other painters--for instance, Benjamin West and George Morland--who were gifted with one or other of those two qualities only; but the combination of the two carried Reynolds as high as Gainsborough, and far higher than any one else. “One who has a genius,” he writes (as early as 1759), “will comprehend in his idea the whole of his work at once; whilst he who is deficient in genius amuses himself in trifling parts of small consideration, attends with scrupulous exactness to the minuter matters only, which he finishes to a nicety, whilst the whole together has a very ill effect.”

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. But this disposition to abstractions, generalisations and classifications is the great glory

of the human mind; that, indeed, which most distinguishes man from other animals, and is the source of everything that can be called science.

“I believe his early acquaintance with Mr. Mudge, of Exeter [the Rev. Zachariah Mudge, a dissenting minister], a very learned and thinking man, much inclined to philosophise in the spirit of the Platonists, disposed him to this habit. He certainly by that means liberalised in a high degree the theory of his own art; and if he had been more methodically instituted in the early part of his life, and had possessed more leisure for study and reflection, he would in my opinion have pursued this method with great success.

“He had a strong turn for humour, and well saw the weak sides of things. He enjoyed every circumstance of his good fortune and had no affectation on that subject. And I do not know a fault or weakness of his that he did not convert into something that bordered on a virtue, instead of pushing it to the confines of a vice. E. B.”