Sir Joshua Reynolds: The Painter in Society

Sir Joshua Reynolds: The Painter in Society

Richard Wendorf

Language: English

Pages: 264

ISBN: 0674809661

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


That Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792) became the most fashionable painter of his time was not simply due to his artistic gifts or good fortune. The art of pleasing, Richard Wendorf contends, was as much a part of Reynolds's success--in his life and in his work--as the art of painting. The author's examination of Reynolds's life and career illuminates the nature of eighteenth-century English society in relation to the enterprise of portrait-painting. Conceived as an experiment in cultural criticism, written along the fault lines that separate (but also link) art history and literary studies, Sir Joshua Reynolds: The Painter in Society explores the ways in which portrait-painting is embedded in the social fabric of a given culture as well as in the social and professional transaction between the artist and his or her subject. In addition to providing a new view of Reynolds, Wendorf's book develops a thoroughly new way of interpreting portraiture.

Wendorf takes us into Reynolds's studio to show us the artist deploying his considerable social and theatrical skills in staging his sittings as carefully orchestrated performances. The painter's difficult relationship with his sister Frances (also an artist and writer), his complicated maneuvering with patrons, the manner in which he set himself up as an artist and businessman, his highly politicized career as the first president of the Royal Academy of Arts: as each of these aspects of Reynolds's practice comes under Wendorf's scrutiny, a new picture of the painter emerges--more sharply defined and fully fleshed than the Reynolds of past portraits, and clearly delineating his capacity for provoking ambivalence among friends and colleagues, and among viewers and readers today.

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"used to read the same books;' Burney writes, "discuss their subjects & openly and without reserve exchange opinions. I never met with a more strait forward understanding, he threw away no words in deviating from the direct line to truth."69 As he once wrote to his daughter, Reynolds "has a bit of divinity in his heart as well as hand."70 Reynolds believed that his prescription for happiness could be summarized in a simple maxim: "The great principle of being happy in this world is not to regard

continued painting, without heeding his appeal for the hairy honours of his head; and only coolly repeating, "I suppose, then, 1 must not call it a wig?"SO Burney himself did not know how to excuse her strange behavior: "she doubtless intended to expose me as an artificial beau to the company, all in full dress and ready to laugh at a bald head:' She "never made the least apology for her mistake or offered a single word to convince me that she thought my [hair1 was natura!:' Frances Reynolds had

1755, the French visitor Jean-Andre Rouquet described this general phenomenon with characteristic humor: A portrait painter in England makes his fortune in a very extraordinary manner. As soon as he has attained a certain degree of reputation, he hires a house fit for a person of distinction; then he assumes an air of importance and superiority over the rest of his profession, depending less on his personal abilities to support this superiority, than on the credit of some powerful friend, or of

'Stay as you are, my little fellow: said Sir Joshua, and at once transferred the boy's action and expression to the canvas."165 A similar story has attached itself to the frightened pose of young Lady Anne in the great portrait of the Duke of Marlborough's family at Blenheim: in the painting the four-year-old shrinks from a mask with which an older • 127· SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS sister threatens her (Figure 21); in the studio she shrank from the painter himself.166 These strong improvisational

sitting "may be supposed to take an indirect and laudable method of arriving at self-knowledge:'22 To find oneself posed in a certain way, within a particular setting, in juxtaposition to another person-let alone as someone else or embodying abstract qualities-is to see oneself anew. Portraiture enables one to stand outside oneself, to test one's own conception of self against that of a sympathetic interpreter; and this is a process (I want to insist) crucial to the negotiations and sittings

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