Part 2

It is characteristic of Sir Joshua Reynolds that, having become President, he should be at great pains to justify his new position. It was not an empty honour, the annual exhibition would need and demand proof of his accomplishment and industry, while, as the Academy was to be a teaching Institution, he saw himself face to face with the necessity of finding time to prepare addresses for the benefit of the students. 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. 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. 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. Nearly one hundred and fifty years have passed since the Academy was established, but it has not produced another teacher like Reynolds. He had not exhausted his honours when he came to be President; in years to come he was to become painter in ordinary to the King and to be entrusted with a considerable commission by that remarkable woman the Empress Catherine of Russia. He was a welcome guest at many of the most beautiful homes in England and he travelled abroad extensively, but nothing kept him from his Presidential duties until the last year of his life brought sickness in their train.

_Duchess of Devonshire and Child_

(_Chatsworth_)

This picture, sometimes known as "The Jumping Baby," is in the possession of the Duke of Devonshire at Chatsworth. When first seen some people found fault with it, Horace Walpole among the number, but it has gained popularity with age. The composition is very skilled, but the Duchess is perhaps rather too much _en grande tenue_ to appear as nurse.

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. The first Exhibitions were held in Pall Mall, but during Sir Joshua's lifetime there was a move to Somerset House. To 1838 the annual display was transferred to the National Gallery, and in 1869 Burlington House became the centre of activities that increase in volume if not in interest year by year.

It is impossible to compile a list of the distinguished men and interesting women who sat to Sir Joshua, but a very brief resume may be made of some of the most familiar. The three Ladies Waldegrave, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, Lady Cockburn and her children, Mrs Master as Hebe, Miss Kitty Fisher, Miss Nelly O'Brien, Mrs Lloyd, the Honourable Lavinia Bingham, Angelica Kauffmann, Mrs Hoare and her baby, Countess Waldegrave and daughter, Mrs Siddons as the Tragic Muse, The Graces decorating a Terminal Figure of Hymen, the Duchess of Devonshire and baby--here we have a few of the female portraits by which the painter would have achieved success if he had painted no others.

He painted four or five portraits of King George III., two of his wife, and two of George IV. as Prince of Wales; the number of peers is legion. Among statesmen Edmund Burke sat to him five times and Charles James Fox four. Brinsley Sheridan sat twice and Horace Walpole three times. Other men sitters of note were Bartolozzi the engraver, Dr Burney, David Garrick, Dr Johnson, Boswell, Oliver Goldsmith, Gibbon the historian, Tobias Smollett and Laurence Sterne. Of himself Reynolds painted between forty and fifty portraits.

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; but there are many canvases from which the children alone smile at us, captured for our time in all their youthful radiance though some have lain for a century dead. The children of Lady Smythe stand happily apart from their rather self-conscious mother, and among the single-figure portraits of children are Lady Catherine Pelham Clinton, Lady Caroline Howard, Miss Emma Hart (afterwards Lady Hamilton), Charles, Viscount Althorp, Miss Bowles the Strawberry Girl, "The Age of Innocence," "The Infant Samuel," and many others that the mind and the memory love to dwell upon. 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. Down to 1789, when sickness came suddenly upon him, his was a prosperous career, passed in the most stimulating company of his age, associated with foreign travel and delightful English holidays. Only once in all these later years does his critical insight appear to have failed him, and this was when he went to Holland and remained unmoved by the work of Franz Hals. What, one wonders, did he see or fail to see when he stood before the portrait of the Laughing Cavalier and the musician (Der Vaar), the painter's wife and the market girl? 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.

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