Sir Joshua Reynolds

1723 - 1792 • English • Painter • Romantic/Grand Manner

"[Painting] ought to be as far removed from the vulgar idea of imitation as the refined civilized state in which we live, is removed from a gross state of nature; and those who have not cultivated their imaginations, which the majority of mankind certainly have not, may be said, in regard to the arts, to continue in this state of nature." - Sir Joshua Reynolds

The comment above is from Reynolds's Discourses on Art (1778), an influential doctrine of the eclectic GRAND MANNER. He was the first president of the Royal Academy and his preaching of this grandiosity had great impact. So did his disapproving judgments on NETHERLANDISH art rendered in his Journey to Flanders and Holland, written in 1781 and first published in 1797 (for example, see STEEN, CUYP, and van der HEYDEN). His attitude of disdain extended to the other side of the Atlantic: In response to the American COPLEY, who had sent his best painting, Boy with a Squirrel ( 1765 ), to London, Reynolds advised Copley to bring his talent to Europe before it was too late. Some of his contemporaries (e.g., GAINSBOROUGH) were interested in the "natural" world, but Reynolds's goal was to transcend base nature, as in the quotation above, and to glorify on canvas individuals who merited it. Thus, Reynolds did not strive to report an accurate likeness of his sitter so much as to orchestrate a fantasy. He found landscape interesting to the extent that it expressed the greatness of his sitter. The effect of his ideas is beautifully illustrated by comparing two portraits of the same man that are conveniently located in the same place, m Amherst College's Mead Art Museum (Amherst, Massachusetts). Reynolds's portrait of Lord Jeffery Amherst ( 1765) presents a handsome, youthful, pensive hero in full armor with a sword at his side, his helmet sitting on a map. (Amherst had been made Britain's commander in chief in America by William Pitt-his assignment: to rout the French.) Dark storm clouds pass behind him, but the lower portion of the sky is light, a conceit intimating that, thanks to Sir Jeffery's efforts, the land was now safe. (This metaphor pleased Reynolds, who used it for other military victors.) Five years before Reynolds painted him, BLACKBURN, a little-known English-trained artist who worked in America, also made a portrait of Sir Jeffery. Already 43 at the time of Blackburn's portrait, Amherst looks it. He has a double chin and flushed cheeks, and wears his "red coat" with its brass buttons straining over a middle-aged paunch. He is against a plain dark background and stares directly out of the picture at the viewer, rather than gazing pensively into the beyond, as in Reynolds's portrait. The comparison highlights not only the artifice of the Grand Manner, but also its use as a coordinate of political aggrandizement.