The Golden Age of English Painting Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723 -1792) Master of Heroic Idealism

Self-Portrait, 1780, oil on wood, Royal Academy of Art, London, UK First and foremost, Reynolds was the most innovative portrait painter of his generation.

The house, in which Joshua Reynolds was born, Plympton, Devon, 1869, print Joshua Reynolds was born on July16, 1723, into the family of Samuel Reynolds (1681–1745) and his wife, Theophila Potter (1688–1756) the 7th child in the brood of five boys and six girls at Plympton, Devon. Unfortunately five of his siblings had died in infancy.

All the Reynolds children drew pictures and most of them drew better than Joshua. But Joshua did not get along well at school, and so he felt the necessity of doing something else instead. Strange as it may seem, in 1732 Joshua had come across the readings of the “Jesuit’s Perspective” concerning the rules of drawings.

Reynolds’ first recorded portrait, made at the age of 12, dates from 1735. The subject was a local clergyman named Thomas Smart. One day listening to Revd. Smart’s sermon, Joshua made a sketch of the man.

A large house, No. 47, on the western side of the square, was for many years the residence of Sir Joshua Reynolds. Here duchesses and marchionesses, ladies and fair daughters of the aristocracy sat to the monarch of the world of art to be immortalized by his brush. Here Burke and Foote, Goldsmith and Dr. Johnson, Garrick and Boswell, and most of the celebrated men of the century, were in the habit of assembling, and of dining almost every week at the hospitable board of the great portrait painter.

It is said that in his long life Reynolds painted over 3000 portraits It is said that in his long life Reynolds painted over 3000 portraits. His influence on the tastes and manners of the British artists to come is undeniable. Reynolds’ many students included Sir Henry Raeburn, Hugh Barron, Thomas Beach, Carl Fredrik von Breda, William Doughty, John Hoppner, John Hamilton Mortimer, George Engleheart, James Northcote, Archibald Robertson, William Owen etc. The loss was great.

The poet William Blake wrote on Reynolds death: “When Sir Joshua Reynolds died All Nature was degraded; The King dropped a tear Into the Queens Ear; And all his pictures faded…”