Sir Joshua Reynolds(1723–1792)

Joshua Reynolds was born on the sixteenth of July 1723 at Plympton St Maurice on the south Devon coast outside Plymouth, seventh of the eleven children of the Reverend Samuel Reynolds, master of the Plympton Grammar School and a fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, and Theophila Potter of Honiton. He was educated by his father, drew constantly from the age of eight, and at seventeen was apprenticed in London to the leading portrait painter of the day Thomas Hudson (the Reynolds master, himself a Devon painter). He served the four-year apprenticeship from 1740 to 1743, returned to Devon to practise on his own account at Plymouth Dock through the late 1740s, and in May 1749 sailed from Plymouth as the guest of his patron Captain Augustus Keppel on HMS Centurion to Lisbon and Minorca, the start of the three-year Italian tour that became the formative period of his work.

He spent two years in Rome from October 1750, copying systematically the High Renaissance and the Bolognese seicento masters in the great Roman collections, six months in Florence and Bologna in 1752, and four months in Venice in 1752 absorbing the Venetian colourist tradition that became the technical foundation of his later portraiture. He returned to London in October 1752 in his thirtieth year, took the lease of 5 Great Newport Street, Covent Garden, and within five years had become the leading society portrait painter of the city. By 1755 he was charging twelve guineas the head, twenty-four for the half-length, forty-eight for the full-length; by 1760 he was painting two hundred and ten sitters in a single year and earning over six thousand pounds a year, the highest professional income of any English painter to that date. He moved in 1760 to the large house at 47 Leicester Fields (now Leicester Square) that he kept for the rest of his life, with the long painting room, the standing gallery and the studio of three assistants.

He sat through the late 1750s and 1760s at the centre of the cultural life of mid-Georgian London. He was a founder member with Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke, Oliver Goldsmith, David Garrick, Bennet Langton, Topham Beauclerk, Sir John Hawkins and Anthony Chamier of The Club, the small dining-society at the Turk's Head in Gerrard Street that met every Friday from 1764 to discuss letters, philosophy and the arts; the Boswell Life records Reynolds at the centre of the conversations Johnson dominated. He painted Johnson eight times, Burke seven times, Garrick six times, Goldsmith four times, and the leading social, military and political figures of the Whig and Tory establishments in roughly equal proportion: the great Devonshire House and Spencer family portraits, the Marlborough and Bedford family pieces, the Three Ladies Waldegrave (1780), and the long sequence of officer-portraits of the senior commanders of the Seven Years' War and the American Revolutionary War.

He was the central figure in the petition of the Society of Artists to George the Third in November 1768 for the foundation of a Royal Academy of Arts. The Academy was instituted by the king's letters patent of the tenth of December 1768, and Reynolds was elected by the founding forty Academicians as its first President; he was knighted by the king the following spring and held the presidency for the next twenty-three years until his death. He delivered between January 1769 and December 1790 the fifteen Discourses on Art, the inaugural lectures given at the Annual Distribution of Prizes at the Academy, in which he set out the doctrine of the Grand Manner, the elevation of the painted subject to the heroic and the historical register, the study of the High Renaissance and the antique as the foundation of academic training, and the institutional vocabulary of British academic painting for the next century. The Discourses, published collectively in 1797 by Edmond Malone, remain on the reading list of every academic-painting course in the English-speaking world.

He died at his house at 47 Leicester Fields on the twenty-third of February 1792 in his sixty-ninth year and was buried in the crypt of St Paul's Cathedral on the third of March 1792 with full ceremonial, the procession from Somerset House (the Academy's new home) attended by ninety-one fellow-academicians and a great public crowd. He had painted approximately two thousand portraits in the working forty years of his London career, the body of the modern British state-portrait inheritance, in the great national, regimental, university, parliamentary and family-house collections across the British Isles and the United States. The Royal Academy he founded continues today on Piccadilly at Burlington House, the Annual Summer Exhibition (the longest-running open submission art exhibition in the world) has been held every year since 1769, and the fifteen Discourses on Art remain the foundational text of the British academic-painting tradition. The Reynolds name in modern British art carries the weight of the Plympton schoolmaster's son who founded the institutional vocabulary of the academic tradition.