Tuesday, May 16, 2017

Reynolds

Joshua Reynolds
Portrait of the Ladies Waldegrave
1780
oil on canvas
National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh

Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792) became the dominant authority on the art of painting in England during the second half of the 18th century, but his own practice as a portrait painter was notorious even in his own day for the instability of his pigments. In the first group of Reynolds portraits gathered here, the complexions of the sitters appear ghostly pale with blotchy red cheeks. This was not the effect Reynolds originally created in the studio. He had devised an idiosyncratic mixture of pigments to achieve the underlying pink flesh-tones he wanted, followed by a pink glaze mixed from a different range of pigments for the cheek-blushes. Sad to say, the red pigment in the underlying flesh tone was particularly unstable and quickly faded, leaving white pigment behind and producing skin that looked like plaster, while the alternative red pigment in the blushes retained its intensity and soon began to appear grossly exaggerated.      

Joshua Reynolds
Portrait of Master Bunbury
1780-81
oil on canvas
Philadelphia Museum of Art

Joshua Reynolds
Portrait of Mrs Elisha Mathew
1777
canvas
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Joshua Reynolds
Portrait of Sarah Campbell
1777-78
oil on canvas
Yale Center for British Art

Joshua Reynolds
Portrait of Lady Elizabeth Delmé and her children
ca. 1777-79
oil on canvas
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Earlier in his career, when Reynolds painted his own portrait in the late 1740s (immediately below) he demonstrated that he did indeed understand how to mix durable pigments for credible skin-tones that would not self-destruct. His own face has consequently survived in far better shape than the faces of his fashionable clients. What is amazing  given the scale of his blunders and the pretentiousness of his pronouncements  is how high Reynolds's artistic reputation remains even today. Impatient and sloppy as a painter, he yet possessed an uncanny talent for attracting institutional prestige.

Joshua Reynolds
Self-portrait
ca. 1745-49
oil on canvas
Savannah College of Art and Design

Joshua Reynolds
Portrait of Richard Peers Symons MP
1770-71
oil on canvas
Cincinnati Art Museum

In the background of the portrait immediately above, a miniature Farnese Hercules with its back turned echoes the pose of the green-suited MP.  The gaze of Hercules is directed toward the interior of the picture, down a vista like a tunnel leading to a lofty classical building, only slightly ruinous. Richard Peers Symons, the principle subject, is thus depicted with the utmost possible flattery gazing forward into the British future in the same spirit of prudent strength and mastery which the small doppelgänger behind him manifests with its gaze into the heroic past.

Joshua Reynolds
Portrait of Lady Frances Finch
1781-82
oil on canvas
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

Joshua Reynolds
Portrait of Francis Rawdon Hastings
1789-90
oil on canvas
Royal Collection, Windsor

Joshua Reynolds
Portrait of Miss Elizabeth Ingram
1757
oil on canvas
Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool

Joshua Reynolds
Portrait of Lady Sunderlin
1786
oil on canvas
Gemäldegalerie, Berlin

Joshua Reynolds
Equestrian portrait of Sir Jeffrey Amherst
ca. 1768
oil on canvas
Yale Center for British Art

Joshua Reynolds
An Officer on Horseback
1760s
oil on canvas
Dulwich Picture Gallery, London

Joshua Reynolds
Portrait of Mrs Siddons as the Tragic Muse
1789
oil on canvas
Dulwich Picture Gallery, London