Sir Joshua Reynolds

The life of Sir Joshua Reynolds,
scene by scene

1. 1740London

   A teenage boy from Devon arrives in London. He is Joshua Reynolds, son of Samuel Reynolds, master of the grammar school at Plympton. His father has placed him with Thomas Hudson, a portrait painter who also came from Devon. The usual apprenticeship ran seven years. This one was set at four.

   Joshua never finished them. In the summer of 1743, an errand Hudson asked him to run led to a quarrel. Reynolds left Hudson's studio and went home to Devon to paint portraits on his own.

2. 1749Minorca and Rome

   A warship, the Centurion, puts in at Plymouth. Her commander is Augustus Keppel, just twenty-four. He offers the young painter a passage to the Mediterranean, and Reynolds takes it, bound for Italy. He spent some months at Port Mahon on Minorca, painting the officers there, and then went on to Rome.

   In Rome he took no teacher. He copied Raphael and Michelangelo in the Vatican instead. While copying in the Vatican rooms he caught a severe cold. The cold passed, but it left him hard of hearing, and for the rest of his life he carried an ear trumpet. After about two years he headed home in 1752 by way of Florence, Venice and Paris.

3. 1764London

   In February 1764 a handful of men sit down to supper at the Turk's Head tavern in Gerrard Street, Soho. This is The Club, which Reynolds founded with his friend Samuel Johnson, the man behind the great Dictionary. The statesman Edmund Burke and the writer Oliver Goldsmith were members too.

   Around this time Reynolds was painting Lady Sarah Bunbury, the wife of Charles Bunbury. In the picture she wears a pale pink silk robe and holds a round gold dish over a smoking altar. High on the left, three stone goddesses lean together with their arms around one another. Reynolds showed the full-length portrait in 1765.

   Painted around this timeLady Sarah Bunbury Sacrificing to the Graces
4. 1769London

   On 2 January 1769, at the newly founded Royal Academy, its president stands up before the students. Reynolds gives his first lecture on how an artist should learn. He went on to give fifteen of these talks, the last in 1790, and they were published as the Discourses.

   On 21 April, King George III knighted him at St James's Palace. From then on he was Sir Joshua. Five days later the Academy's first exhibition opened in Pall Mall.

5. 1782London

   On 9 February 1782 a young Guards officer, George Coussmaker, takes his seat in Reynolds's studio for the first time. Reynolds's appointment book shows he came back again and again, twenty-one sittings by 16 April. His horse was brought in for sittings of its own.

   Look at the finished picture. The officer in his red coat leans against a tree trunk with his legs crossed. Beside him a brown horse with a white blaze on its face bows its head toward the ground.

   Painted around this timeCaptain George K. H. Coussmaker (1759–1801)
6. 1784London

   The actress Sarah Siddons sits for Reynolds dressed as the Muse of Tragedy. On the finished canvas, Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse, he wrote his name along the hem of her dress. Siddons later recalled him saying he could not lose the honor of going down to posterity on the hem of her garment.

   That same year the court painter Allan Ramsay died, and Reynolds took his place as Principal Painter to the King.

7. 1789London

   On 13 July 1789, Reynolds writes in his appointment book that his eye has begun to be obscured and he cannot work. Within about ten weeks he had lost the sight of his left eye. He touched up a few unfinished pictures, but he never began another.

   The next February, the Academy's general assembly refused to back his candidate, the architect Joseph Bonomi. Reynolds resigned as president. In March he returned to the chair.

8. 1792London

   On 23 February 1792, Reynolds dies at his house in Leicester Fields, aged sixty-eight. His friend Edmund Burke was one of his executors. On 3 March his coffin was carried from the Royal Academy to St Paul's Cathedral, with ten noblemen, among them three dukes and two marquesses, holding the pall. He was buried in the crypt.

   Today his young officer in the woods hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and Lady Sarah at her altar hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago.