Joshua Reynolds

Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723 - 1792) was the most important and influential of eighteenth-century English painters, specialising in portraits and promoting the "Grand Style" in painting which depended on idealization of the imperfect. He was one of the founders and first President of the Royal Academy. George III appreciated his merits and knighted him in 1769.

Reynolds was born in Plympton St Maurice[?], Devon, on 16 July 1723, and apprenticed in 1740 to the fashionable portrait painter Thomas Hudson[?], with whom he remained until 1743. From 1749 to 1752, he spent over two years in Italy, mainly in Rome, where he studied the Old Masters and acquired a taste for the "Grand Style". From 1753 on, he lived and worked in London. He became the close friend of Dr Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith, Edmund Burke, Henry Thrale and David Garrick. With his rival Thomas Gainsborough, he was the dominant English portraitist of the second half of the 18th century. Reynolds painted in more of an idealized fashion than his rival. A brilliant academic, his lectures ("Discourses") on art, delivered at the Royal Academy between 1769 and 1790, are remembered for their sensitivity and perception. In one of these lectures he was of the opinion that "invention, strictly speaking, is little more than a new combination of those images which have been previously gathered and deposited in the memory." In 1789 he lost the sight of his left eye, and on 23 February 1792 he died in his house in Leicester Fields[?], London. He was buried in St. Paul's Cathedral.

External Links

• the e-text of Sir Joshua Reynolds's Seven Discourses on Art (http://www.abacci.com/books/book.asp?bookID=2169)
• http://www.nga.gov/cgi-bin/pbio?26400 National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.: Sir Joshua Reynolds
• http://cgfa.sunsite.dk/reynolds/reynolds_bio.htm Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792)
• http://www.j-m-w-turner.co.uk/artist/turner-reynolds.htm Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-92)
• http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/reynolds_sir_joshua Artcyclopedia: Sir Joshua Reynolds
• Twelve Joshua Reynolds portraits (http://www.thrale.com/history/english/hester_and_henry/hesters_writings/reynolds_portraits.php) in Henry Thrale's library.

Books

• http://www.yale.edu/yup/books/085338.htm SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS, A Complete Catalogue of His Paintings
• http://www.yale.edu/yup/books/087330.htm The Letters of Sir Joshua Reynolds
• http://www.npg.org.uk/live/pubreyn.asp Sir Joshua Reynolds: The Painter in Society