Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792), English painter and writer on art. He was one of the foremost portraitists of his age, the first president of the Royal Academy of Arts, and the author of 15 Discourses (lectures) that constitute the finest body of art criticism written in English in the 18th century. The prestige that he enjoyed contributed to raising the status of the artist in Britain from that of mere craftsman, and he ranks as one of the most important figures in the history of British art.

Reynolds was born at Plympton, Devon, on July 16, 1723, the seventh of 11 children of a clergyman who had studied at Oxford University and was headmaster of the local school. The young Joshua inherited his father’s scholarly inclinations and as a boy read books on art in his library. It was from these that he first absorbed the idea of painting as a high-minded profession rather than the mere manual skill that it was generally considered to be in Britain at this period.

From 1740 to 1743 Reynolds studied in London under Thomas Hudson (who also came from Devon). Hudson’s work now seems rather stiff and repetitive, but at the time he was the most successful portraitist in the country. For the next six years Reynolds worked as a portraitist in London and Devon, until in 1749 a chance encounter with a naval officer in Plymouth gave him the opportunity to sail for Italy, where he stayed for two years. During this period, he lived mainly in Rome, where his study of ancient art and the great masters of the Renaissance helped crystallize his ideas about the nobility of the artist’s calling.

On his return to England in October 1752, Reynolds settled permanently in London. One of the first major works he produced there was a portrait of Augustus Keppel (1753-1754, National Maritime Museum, London), the naval officer who had taken him to Italy and who became a lifelong friend. It was intended as a token of gratitude, but Reynolds kept it in his studio for several years, evidently to impress clients with his prowess, for it is a magnificent full-length portrait, showing Keppel in a stirring pose.

The pose was based on the Apollo Belvedere, an ancient statue that was one of Rome’s most celebrated artistic treasures. Reynolds’s intention in using such a Classical model was to elevate portraiture above its traditional role of rendering a mere likeness. He later said that since a painter, unlike a poet, “cannot make his hero talk like a great man, he must make him look like one”, and that the best way to show a subject’s nobility of mind was to “imitate the Ancients”. There was little call, in Britain, for grand compositions illustrating themes in history, religion, or mythology but, by investing portraiture with the dignity and grandeur of history painting, Reynolds sought to raise it to a new plane.

Reynolds quickly became the leading portraitist of his time in Britain. By 1758 he had more than 100 clients a year. He organized his working life carefully. His “sitter books”, in which he recorded his appointments, show that he sometimes had as many as six clients a day, although three was more usual. His success was due not to his classical learning but to his amazing versatility. He painted men, women, and children with equal skill and, in spite of his huge output, he rarely repeated himself. He could find a pose and expression that vividly captured the personality of each new sitter, from a tough old soldier (such as Lord Heathfield, 1787, National Gallery, London) to a dignified statesman, or from a refined society beauty (such as Susannah, Mrs Francis Beckford, 1756, Tate Gallery, London) to a small child enjoying playing at dressing up. He also excelled at group portraits; among the most attractive are The Marlborough Family (1778, Blenheim Palace) and Lady Elizabeth Delmé and her Children (1777, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.). Thomas Gainsborough, his only serious rival, paid tribute to Reynolds’s versatility when, in exasperated admiration, he said “Damn him! How various he is!”. Some of Reynolds’s best portraits are utterly straightforward and unpretentious, with none of the heroic allusions that he recommended. Thus his work sometimes contradicted his theories.

Reynolds was knighted by George III at St James’s Palace in 1769. With his great prestige and air of authority, he was completely at ease in the elevated circles in which he moved, and his closest friends were mainly distinguished literary men rather than other painters. They included the most eminent literary figure of all—Dr Johnson—and his biographer James Boswell; indeed, Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson is dedicated to Reynolds. When the Royal Academy was founded in 1768, he became its first president and held the post for the rest of his life. Between 1769 and 1790 he delivered his Discourses to the students there. They are admirably written and a major source of information on attitudes towards art in the 18th century.

In 1781 Reynolds made his second trip abroad, visiting the Netherlands and Flanders (modern Belgium). He went to Flanders again in 1785. The notes that he took on the pictures that he saw there suggest that he was still eager to excel as a history painter, but the pictures that he did produce in this field fall far short of his portraits, looking contrived and clumsy. He continued to work as a portraitist until 1789, when failing eyesight forced him to stop. He died in London on February 23, 1792, aged 68, and was the first British artist to be honoured with burial in St Paul’s Cathedral. Reynolds had been a much-liked and respected man, and one of his friends, the statesman Edmund Burke, wrote that “never was a funeral of such ceremony attended with so much sincere concern of all sorts of people”.