Joshua Reynolds: The Complete Story
Joshua Reynolds ran British art like a prime minister, painted up to 150 sitters a year, and experimented so recklessly with pigments that some of his portraits faded before their owners died. He founded the Royal Academy and wrote its bible.
The deaf, gregarious son of a Devon schoolmaster made portrait painting an intellectual profession, and made himself its first knight.
Joshua Reynolds at a glance:
1723: born in Plympton, Devon, a schoolmaster's son who reads Richardson's art theory as a boy and takes it literally.
1750: two years in Rome; a cold caught in the Vatican corridors leaves him half deaf for life.
1768: founding president of the Royal Academy, knighted within the year.
1784: paints Sarah Siddons as the Tragic Muse and signs his name on the hem of her robe.
1792: dies at 68; the funeral at St Paul's has ten pallbearers, three of them dukes.
Devon, Rome, and a cold in the Vatican
Reynolds was born in Plympton, Devon, on July 16, 1723, apprenticed to the portraitist Thomas Hudson, and spent 1749 to 1752 studying in Italy, where a severe cold caught while copying in the Vatican corridors left him partly deaf for life. He came home carrying the Grand Style, the conviction that portraiture could borrow the poses and gravity of Michelangelo and Raphael, and London bought it by the acre.
First president, first knight
When the Royal Academy was founded in 1768, Reynolds became its first president and was knighted within months.
His fifteen Discourses on Art, delivered to students over twenty years, became the most influential body of art theory in English: rules exist, they argue, so that genius knows exactly what it is transcending.
At his peak he ran a studio machine seeing up to 150 sitters a year, with drapery painters finishing the clothes.
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Siddons, the Club, and the rivalry
His Sarah Siddons as the Tragic Muse of 1784 enthroned an actress like a sibyl, the Grand Style thesis in one canvas.
Off duty he was the most connected man in London, founder in 1764, with Samuel Johnson, of The Club, where Burke, Garrick, and Boswell argued weekly.
His great rival Gainsborough painted faster, fresher, and from life; London happily paid them both, and Reynolds, in his final Discourse, saluted him.
The myth of the stuffy academic
Posterity cast Reynolds as the rulebook Blake raged against.
Two corrections survive scrutiny: the Discourses preach ambition rather than obedience, and the man himself was an inveterate experimenter, mixing carmine, bitumen, and wax in search of Venetian glow.
The experiments backfired famously: carmine cheeks faded to chalk within years, and contemporaries joked that his portraits died before their sitters. The ruined surfaces are the proof he was never merely careful.
Where to see Reynolds
Reynolds lost the sight of his left eye in 1789, laid down the brush, and died on February 23, 1792, buried in St Paul's Cathedral beside Wren. The National Portrait Gallery, Tate Britain, the Wallace Collection, Kenwood House, and the Huntington in California hold the core, and Siddons reigns at both Dulwich and the Huntington in her two versions.
The Discourses
The fifteen Discourses he delivered to Academy students remain English painting's most argued book: the grand style, borrowing as method, genius as labor.
William Blake filled his copy's margins with rage, This Man Was Hired to Depress Art, and the annotations are now read as keenly as the text.
Being worth Blake's fury is its own certificate. The Discourses set the terms even for everyone who rejected them.
Five sitters a day
His pocket diaries survive and read like a dentist's book: five or six sitters a day at the peak, booked weeks ahead.
Assistants handled drapery and replicas while he kept faces and invention; the fee ladder, head to full length, was public knowledge.
Roughly three thousand portraits came out of the system: British society, processed and ennobled at industrial rate.
The collector who dissected
He spent a fortune on old masters: Rembrandts, Titians, cartloads of drawings, one of the largest collections any artist ever assembled.
He studied them like a surgeon, and famously scraped at least one down to the ground to learn how it was built.
The collection scattered at auction after his death. The lessons had already moved into the portraits, where they were harder to lose.
The Joshua Reynolds questions that keep coming up
Who founded the Royal Academy? A group of 36 artists in 1768, with Reynolds as first president, a post he held until his death in 1792.
Why do Reynolds portraits fade? He experimented with unstable pigments and mediums, carmine, bitumen, wax, chasing old-master glow. Many faces faded or cracked within decades.
Reynolds or Gainsborough? Reynolds offered learned grandeur, Gainsborough speed and naturalness. The rivalry defined a golden age, and Reynolds praised him generously in the end.
Where can I see Reynolds? The National Portrait Gallery, Tate Britain, the Wallace Collection, and Kenwood in London, and the Huntington in California.
How much does a Reynolds cost? The Portrait of Omai was valued around 50 million pounds when saved for Britain in 2023, jointly bought by the National Portrait Gallery and the Getty.
Did he ever marry? No. His sister Frances kept house, painted, and argued with him; the household ran on work, dinners, and Boswell taking notes.
More secrets to unlock
On the hem of her garment
Reynolds painted the Siddons muse with his name signed on the hem of her robe, telling her that he could not resist going down to posterity on the edge of her garment. Both of them did.
