Sir Joshua Reynolds

Joshua Reynolds – Apprenticeship with Thomas Hudson and studies of the Old Masters

Joshua Reynolds was born on 16 July 1723 in Plympton near Plymouth in the English county of Devon, the son of a clergyman and school principal. His elder sister, the writer Mary Palmer, nurtured a love for the fine arts and encouraged her brother’s talent by taking on half of his tuition costs with the revered London portrait painter Thomas Hudson. Joshua Reynolds supposedly started his apprenticeship with Hudson at the age of four, but after two and a half years there was nothing more the veteran master could teach his highly talented student. Reynolds worked for a time as an independent portrait painter in Plymouth where he lived together with his sisters following the death of their father and in 1749, he accompanied the British marine officer Augustus Keppel on his travels through the Mediterranean, and subsequently through Italy by himself – again financed by his sister – to study the Old Masters there, in particular Raphael and Michelangelo. 

The ‘Grand Style’ brought England’s painting to a new flowering

Joshua Reynolds developed his own ‘Grand Style’ with respect, but without veneration, for the Old Masters. When Lord Edgcumbe, a fatherly friend from his childhood, made the suggestion that Reynolds might want to become an apprentice for the portrait painter Pompeo Batoni, the young painter declared with confidence that he also had nothing more to learn from him. Reynolds wanted to lead 18th century English painting out of the shadow of the overpowering Italian and French artists and above all to renew the native history painting which at that time, apart from James Thornhill, was successfully cultivated by hardly any English painter. To this end, he enriched his portraits with historical elements and thus achieved an idealisation and elevation of the sitter, which flattered them and boosted his own popularity. Joshua Reynolds was so loved that even King George III, who personally did not know much about the artist, felt compelled to appoint him as the first president of the Royal Academy of Arts and even elevate him one year later with a peerage; in 1784, Reynolds was finally given the position of court painter.

Reynolds’ discourses on art shaped the English art world

Joshua Reynolds was a diligent worker who rarely gave himself time off. He participated in academic discourses with verve, and his understanding of art shaped English art theory for years, penetrating deep into the collective consciousness: Even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective Sherlock Holmes, more than a century later, referred to Joshua Reynolds in The Hound of the Baskervilles. In the last years of his life, blindness in his left eye hindered Reynold’s art, whilst the painter’s hearing was already limited since his first trip to Rome as a result of a severe cold, which is why he is often seen in pictures with a small eat trumpet. Whilst the reception of his artistic oeuvre today sometimes suffers under the stigma of eclecticism, his child portraits in particular are praised for their freshness and innocence. 

Joshua Reynolds died in London on 23 February 1792.