Title: The charm of Reynolds
Author: Mason, James
Language: English
As this book started as an ASCII text book there are no pictures available.


*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The charm of Reynolds" ***


[Illustration: Cover art]


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[Illustration: Portrait of Two Gentlemen]

_Portrait of Two Gentlemen_

(_National Gallery_)

This picture was given to the National Gallery in 1866.  The figure
on the left is the Rev Geo. Huddersford, who, before he took orders,
studied art with Sir Joshua.  The other figure, with violin in right
hand, is J. C. W. Bamfylde.  It is a representative picture enough,
showing how closely the painter observed his sitters and how complete
and skilful was his characterisation.

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[Illustration: Title page]


THE CHARM

OF

REYNOLDS


By JAMES MASON



  _The Charm of Reynolds_


  _Published by T. C. & E. C. Jack
  London and Edinburgh_



  _List of Illustrations_

  Portrait of Two Gentlemen ... _Frontispiece_
      (_National Gallery_)

  Nelly O'Brien
      (_Wallace Collection_)

  Age of Innocence
      (_National Gallery_)

  Duchess of Devonshire and Child
      (_Chatsworth_)



The Charm of Reynolds



I.  HIS ART AND CHARACTER

Portraits painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds are a national asset, and
appeal to the general public in this light almost as strongly as they
appeal to the smaller section that takes a definite interest in
pictures.  The value of the portraits varies considerably; it is
probable that the artist produced between four and five thousand in
his time, sometimes completing three or four in a week for years on
end, and even in his more leisured times producing six or seven per
month, so it was of course inevitable that their value should not be
equal.  The very early work painted in Devonshire is of little worth.
Italy opened the eyes of Joshua Reynolds as it has opened the eyes of
so many British artists since his time.  Fortunate in his life the
painter was; in a certain sense, unfortunate in his art.  The beauty
he has committed to canvas had begun to pass before the artist's days
were numbered, and many of his most successful works are to-day no
more than a pale reflection of their former selves, a remnant most
forlorn of what they were.  One of his most painstaking biographers
and soundest critics, Sir Walter Armstrong, has written, "Speaking
roughly, Sir Joshua's early pictures darken, the works of his middle
period fade, those of his late maturity crack."

"Despite these drawbacks, the painter's position is unassailable, for
it appeals alike to the historian, to the philosopher who looks to
the outward semblance for reflection of the spirit behind the mask,
and to the artist who finds so much to delight him in the point of
achievement to which Reynolds raised portrait painting and can
appreciate the larger aspect of work that is visible in some degree
to everybody.

The man was a sturdy Briton, he worked hard all the days of his life,
he had a large measure of shrewd common sense, great gifts, high
ideals, and sufficient human weakness to make him what the Spaniards
call "hombre como alquier otro," a man like any other.  His art may
stand upon a pedestal but he never did, he was too busy and too
unaffected to pose.  "I'll be a painter if you'll give me a chance to
be quite a good one," he is reported to have said, when a little boy,
to his father, the Plympton school-master, and once a painter he
worked on and on, enjoying life but never abusing it, until 1789,
when he was sixty-six, and apparently in the mellow autumn of his
days.  Then as he was painting in his studio one July morning, the
sight of one eye failed him suddenly.  Quite quietly he laid his
brushes down.  "All things have an end," he said; "I have come to
mine."  Some two and a half years were left to him but he would not
paint any more; he preferred to be judged by the tasks he had
accomplished in the light of health.  He continued to address the
students of the Royal Academy; he consented to remain titular head of
that body though Sir William Chambers and Benjamin West, who was
regarded as a great painter in his day, looked after the actual work
of the high office.  He was not a mere cipher in the counsels of the
Academy on that account; to the end he had his own way.  Very
masterful, very human, very kind, he stands out the most prominent
figure in an age that produced both Gainsborough and Romney.

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[Illustration: Nelly O'Brien]

_Nelly O'Brien_

(_Wallace Collection_)

Reynolds painted three portraits of this famous courtesan, all of
which have been engraved.  The one reproduced here, in which she
wears a straw hat that throws a skilfully expressed shadow over her
face, and in which she has a Maltese terrier on her lap, is said to
be the best.  It has been engraved at least three times.

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The latter half of the eighteenth century owes a heavy debt to Sir
Joshua, so too do we who turn to his many canvases for a glimpse of
the men who bore rule and the women they delighted to honour--or
dishonour.  He has preserved for us all that was notable--statesmen,
soldiers, sailors, churchmen, men of letters, actors, fair women,
frail women, delightful children--they are all there, and if we
cannot see them all quite in their habit as they lived, there is
enough left to give a very fair idea.  The modern market carefully
nursed by a ring of astute professionals will give almost any price
for portraits of fair women by Sir Joshua, though it may be suggested
that his greatest success was in the treatment of men or at least
that he saw far more in men than in women.  But Reynolds had not
studied classic figures for nothing, he could give his fair sitters
some suggestion of direct association with those goddesses of old
time whom he had admired in Italy, and to this treatment no exception
was taken.  It is very rarely that Reynolds makes his women human.
Nellie O'Brien, whose portrait hangs in the Wallace Collection, is
one of the exceptions, and an attempt is made to make the "Duchess of
Devonshire and Child," now at Chatsworth, equally feminine, but one
cannot escape the thought that the mother's gesture as expressed on
the canvas is altogether exceptional.  She could not have played for
long with such a strong healthy baby without ruffling the delightful
costume or the carefully arranged hair, and this, one feels, would
have been unendurable.  Turn, on the other hand, to the portraits of
the men--how significantly their faces speak of their outstanding
habits, labours or desires.  Few people could see so closely into his
sitters as Sir Joshua did, though in very many cases they were not
with him for more than a couple of days.  Yet he seemed able in that
short time to enter into their life history to produce something that
was a fine portrait and yet more than a portrait--a psychological
study, not over elaborated, not insisted upon, not in any way
intruding upon the purely artistic side of the work, but there,
nevertheless, to be seen to-day by those who have eyes to see.  To
quote his own words, he looked upon his sitters "with a dilated eye";
there was just enough imagination to give an attractive setting to
the essentials; there was no need for the classical or symbolical
background to whose doubtful charms the painter surrendered now and
again, but we may consider that these affectations were a part of the
art of his time, and that, while he left many conventions behind him,
he could not trample upon them all.

It is well to remember that Sir Joshua was not a heaven-sent genius,
and that he arrived at the perfection of his achievement by the
addition of hard labour to a considerable natural gift.  He started
out with few advantages save those that come to the young man who
finds a patron early in life; he had many natural errors of taste to
correct.  Students of his life and correspondence will find many
evidences to prove that the first President of the Royal Academy
mastered his self-control, taste, and bearing towards patrons as he
mastered his art, slowly and not without difficulty, but that as soon
as a lesson was mastered it was retained for all time.  The raw
country lad from Devonshire could not become all at once one of the
prominent figures in the society of his time.

This is as it was bound to be--the people who make no mistakes, who
say and do the right thing under all circumstances, who are, so to
speak, ready made and with every modern equipment, are for the most
part the creation of their biographers.  They have not and never had
a real existence as paragons of progress and propriety.  There was a
time when Joshua Reynolds was not very competent, and but
incompletely educated; he became highly accomplished and well read.
There was a time when he exhibited the tendencies of a snob; he
learned to lay them aside, and once abandoned he had no further use
for them.  Unceasing endeavour stimulated and refined him, he
achieved greatness not for himself alone but also for British art.
Before his day the most of the fashionable portrait painters were
foreigners.  Rubens and Van Dyck had many successors and followers
though they had no peers, but after Reynolds had made his mark it was
no longer considered necessary to employ foreign talent.  The
commanding ability of the painter was associated with the easy
authority of the man of the world.  Leaders of English society found
that Sir Joshua, despite his deafness, was a fascinating companion.
He shot and hunted with them, he ate and drank with them, he
entertained them in fashion that smacked more of the country than of
the town.  Dr Johnson would suggest that he sometimes took more than
was absolutely necessary for his well-being, but then the doctor
thought that all drinking, save tea-drinking, was gross indulgence.
From his close acquaintance with men of mark and women of social
distinction came the intimacy that the portraits reveal, the quality
that counts for so much in portraiture.  There were other attractions
greatly admired then and lost now, for Sir Joshua gave his pictures a
fine glaze that is said to have added much to the beauty of the
colouring, but was, alas, ephemeral.  It was purely experimental, and
when we consider the scientific resources of the middle eighteenth
century it is hardly surprising to find that the charm did not
endure.  For all we know to the contrary this purely evanescent
quality constituted one of the charms of Reynolds while he lived, but
his fame rests upon more enduring foundations.  We look in vain to
the spoken and written word or to the written word alone to sum up
eighteenth century men of thought and action as clearly and
definitely as Sir Joshua has done; his is a sincerity devoid of
prejudice.  We see men as they were even if the most of his women are
seen as they would have wished to be.  Here then is a part at least
of the charm of Sir Joshua Reynolds, the man was very human and very
discreet.  He was by no means free from jealousy notably where
Gainsborough and Romney were concerned; he knew well enough that they
were great competitors and formidable.  He lived a bachelor, and
despite all the Paul Prys among his contemporaries the story of his
amours (if any) remains untold.  Here at least is a fine and ample
discretion.  It is with Angelica Kauffmann that his name has been
associated.  We know he was her friend and admirer, and that she was
one of the two lady members of the Royal Academy as first
constituted, but there is little more than this at the disposal of
the conscientious biographer.  Sir Joshua was not the only man to
succumb to her charms; in years to come Goethe himself was to
acknowledge them.  It is pleasant to think that whatever the great
painter's private affairs may have been, they have remained private
for all time.  What a wealth of moralising this condition has enabled
us to escape!  We are left to concern ourselves solely with his
progress as artist and as man, and there is quite enough in this as
may be gathered from study of the artist's leading biographers.  Sir
Walter Armstrong, Sir Claude Phillips among the moderns, and
Northcote and Leslie and Taylor among those nearer to the artist, are
men who have left little for those who endeavour to glean in the
field of biography.  They have done more than write the story of one
man's life--they have given us a valuable glimpse of contemporary
history.  It is a grateful task to write at considerable length of
Sir Joshua, because of his association with so many leaders of
contemporary thought and action.  Detail is out of the question in
this brief note, but the outlines of the strenuous and honourable
life may be set out here.



II.  HIS LIFE AND TIMES

Joshua Reynolds was born at Plympton in Devonshire in the month of
July 1723.  His father, the Rev. Samuel Reynolds, master of the local
grammar school, was a scholar, and gave his boy the best education at
his command, intending to make him a doctor when he grew up.  But the
lad's talent developed early, his hands were busy with the pencil at
a very early age, and at a time when to most lads reading is a labour
rather than a pastime, he was mastering the elements of perspective
and studying a "Theory of Painting" by one Richardson.  This
precocious interest in art was not to be overlooked, and the Rev.
Samuel Reynolds giving up the idea of the medical profession for his
son, sent him in his seventeenth year to London as pupil to a
portrait painter named Thomas Hudson, a man of some temporary repute.
He stayed there for three years, and then a series of troubles with
his master culminated in a final quarrel, and the boy, for he was
hardly more, left London for his native county, and set up in
Devonport as a portrait painter.  His gift was already sufficient to
gain recognition, and the patronage of local people was neither
denied nor delayed.  Among them was Lord Mount Edgecumbe, who was not
content to have his portrait painted, but, being convinced that the
young artist had talent, did all that in him lay to help its
development.  Portraits were painted in large numbers at Devonport,
many are known to-day, but for the most part they are not classed
with the master's great achievements.  A natural gift and three
years' association with Thomas Hudson could not make the Reynolds we
know and admire.  It was for Italy to do this and Lord Mount
Edgecumbe made Italy possible by introducing his protégé to Commodore
Keppel, a distinguished sailor, who, on receiving a Mediterranean
command in 1749, invited his clever friend to accompany him.
Naturally the offer was not slighted; by the summer of 1749 the young
painter was in the Eternal City copying masterpieces.  But he did not
copy in any slavish fashion; it was his firm belief, and one he was
to expound to students in days to come, that copying is a delusive
industry and keeps the gifts of composition and invention dormant, so
that for lack of proper exercise they lose their vitality.  His mind
was at once synthetical and analytical; he set himself to discover
the foundation of the excellence of the masterpieces, and many of his
copies were in a sense mere notes for his own future guidance.  He
wanted assistance to develop himself; he had no wish to speak in the
language of any of the mighty dead.  Yet his power of making an
effective copy must have been remarkable.  Sir Walter Armstrong, to
whose life of Reynolds reference has been made already, thinks that
one of the Rembrandts in our National Gallery is no more than the
copy by Sir Joshua of an original.  For three years the painter
laboured diligently, not only among the Michelangelos in Rome, but
among the works of lesser men in Padua, Turin, Milan, and Paris.  He
had learned enough in England to call the old masters to his aid on
the Continent, he could appreciate all their canvases could tell him
and, when he returned home in his thirtieth year, he was fully
equipped to take a high place among his fellow artists and to pave
the way to a supremacy that only Gainsborough and Romney could
challenge.

He had not come unscathed through more than three years of foreign
travel, a fall from his horse in the island of Minorca left his face
permanently scarred.  Far more serious was the chill contracted in
the Vatican that brought about the deafness from which he suffered
for the rest of his life.  He reached Devonshire in the autumn of
1752, took a brief holiday there, and then, on the advice of his
patron Lord Mount Edgecumbe, decided to try his fortune in London.
Some of his biographers say he went to Great Newport Street, but it
is more correct to say that his first studio was in St Martin's
Street, from which he moved to Great Newport Street, staying there
till 1760, when he made his last change to 47 Leicester Square, a
house still standing and largely devoted to auction rooms to-day.

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[Illustration: Age of Innocence]

_Age of Innocence_

(_National Gallery_)

This delightful study of a little barefooted girl, wearing a white
dress and seated on the grass, was bought for the Nation at the sale
of Mr Harman's pictures.  It has been engraved by S. W. Reynolds,
Chas. Turner, and others, but the sitter has not been traced.

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One of his first London portraits was a full length study of his
sailor friend Keppel, and that piece of work seems to have been the
foundation of his London fortunes; he never looked back.  Soon the
studio was crowded; one sitter succeeded another; the painter had no
time to do more than work.  His household affairs were watched by his
sister Frances, who does not appear to have been an ideal housekeeper
when the work of the house grew and it became necessary to entertain
and be prepared to receive friends at any reasonable hour.  The
painter grew rich rapidly, and when he moved, in 1760, to the house
in Leicester Square, sister Frances would drive about the town in a
gilded coach with coachman and footman in staring liveries.
Presumably the equipage served to advertise the painter's prosperity.

For many men the rapid success would not have been good, they would
have ceased to strive and would have been content to repeat
themselves, but Joshua Reynolds, with his high ideals and genuine
enthusiasm for work, was only stimulated by prosperity; it was
powerless to spoil him.  While his work was increasing in power he
was selecting friends from the ranks of the most distinguished
scholars and thinkers in town, and while his labours were making him
a bigger artist, the association with great intellects was making him
a bigger man.  The friendship of Edmund Burke and Dr Samuel Johnson
alone would have been enough to have lent distinction to the
painter's life.  He was a great admirer of the lexicographer, and has
left an appreciation of his character, while the old man's last words
to him were an exhortation to read the Bible regularly and not to
paint on Sundays.

To many people Reynolds is known best as the first President of the
Royal Academy, and it is necessary in dealing, however briefly, with
the story of his life to point out how the Academy came into being.
Down to the middle of the eighteenth century exhibitions of modern
work would appear to have been unknown.  London's interest in fine
arts was strictly limited.  People with plenty of money hired an
artist to paint their portrait much as we should hire a painter and
decorator to put a house in good order.  Artists had comparatively
little standing and no representative institution; art was patronised
by a small section of the wealthy classes, and the masses knew little
and cared less about the existence of even leading men.  The Society
of Arts was founded about 1754, and a Society of Artists was founded
soon afterwards.  Hogarth had given some pictures to the gallery of
the Foundling Hospital, established by his great friend Captain
Coram.  Reynolds' former master, Thomas Hudson, Reynolds himself, and
several others sent pictures; the gallery was open to the public and
people visited it with interest and pleasure.  The possibilities of
regular exhibitions of modern work became suddenly apparent then, and
members began to form associations for the development of common
interests.  The Society of Artists received in 1765 a certificate of
Incorporation from King George III., and became the Incorporated
Society of Artists of Great Britain with a membership of more than
two hundred.  Now in this country it is only necessary to establish
one society in order that several other societies may establish
themselves in opposition, emulation, imitation or something of the
kind, and it was quite in the order of things for the Free Society of
Artists to enter into competition with the Incorporated Society.
There were many intrigues, and some of the men who had the ear of the
King, chief among them, it is said, William Chambers the Architect
and Benjamin West, brought about the establishment of the Royal
Academy.  King George signed the Constitution of the new body, which
started with thirty-six members including two ladies, Angelica
Kauffmann and Mary Moser.  William Chambers accepted the office of
Treasurer, while Goldsmith and Dr Johnson represented Ancient History
and Ancient Literature respectively.  To the astonishment of many
people the Presidency was offered to Joshua Reynolds.  His brother
artists wanted him, but King George III., who was not remarkable for
his artistic perceptions, preferred the work of Benjamin West, and is
said to have been unable at first to subscribe to the Academy's
choice.  The part Reynolds played in the business that led to the
collapse of the Incorporated Society and the establishment of the
R.A. remain unknown to this hour.  To all outward seeming he stood
quite aloof from the intrigues, for a part of the time of their
occurrence he was travelling on the Continent; yet those who have
studied his life history closely and noted the abundant and subtle
diplomacy that marked his public as well as his private life, suspect
that his influence was behind many of the developments of those
stirring years.  Be this as it may the fact remains that he did not
at once accept the offer of the Presidency; he asked time to consider
and to consult his friends, and Benjamin West was sent to persuade
him before he would give a favourable answer.  What a pity that there
was no painter at hand to defeat Benjamin West persuading Joshua
Reynolds to become first President of the Royal Academy!  Certainly,
if the latter was pulling the wires he did the work in fashion quite
inimitable.  Having held out sufficiently he gave in, and a year
later received from King George the honour of Knighthood.

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.

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[Illustration: Duchess of Devonshire and Child]

_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.

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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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