Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792)
Reynolds was a portrait painter in the continental Grand Style.
At an early age, Reynolds was apprenticed to Thomas Hudson, a successful London portrait painter. After four years, he spent two years in Rome studying the old Masters. Upon completion, he established himself in London and because of his aristocratic connections, he became an immediate success. His clientele consisted mainly of aristocrats.
Reynolds help found the Royal Academy of Arts (RA) and became its first president. He distinguished himself via his groundbreaking speeches called Discourses on Art, which were put in print and are still relevant today.
These speeches emphasized set rules of taste, importance of authority, and necessity for an artist to study the recognized masterpieces of art during his formative years. He attempted to lead British painting away from the indigenous anecdotal pictures of the early eighteenth century toward the formal rhetoric of the continental Grand Style.
The demands of the age forced Reynolds to devote himself to principally painting portraits of the rich, influential, and famous, but he also managed to delve into Fancy Pictures, a sub-genre of genre painting featuring scenes of everyday life but with an imaginative or storytelling element. In addition he painted portraits of children. Although not a commissioned piece, Age of Innocence is one of Reynold’s most famous paintings of a child.
In 1769, Reynolds was knighted by King George III, only the second artist to be so honored. He was the leading English portraitist of the eighteenth century.
