Miss Nelly O’Brien, circa 1762-1764
Joshua Reynolds: the overlooked master who revolutionised British art
Nowadays Reynolds’ parrot is by far the most engaging part of this picture, which hangs in the National Gallery. The flamboyant red, blue and yellow bird lives in a way Cockburn does not.
If only Reynolds had followed his eccentric whims more often. If only he had painted parrots instead of posh people, and done so spontaneously instead of eruditely, he might be an artist the modern world could love.
Sir Joshua Reynolds, who was born in 1723 and died in 1792, was the most famous and honoured artist of his time, a figure so central to British art history that his statue still greets visitors to the Royal Academy. But modern eyes find his contemporaries infinitely more interesting. The scientific dramas of Joseph Wright of Derby, the intense, almost surreal animal portraits of George Stubbs, and the sensuality of Thomas Gainsborough make Reynolds look dull by comparison. The National Gallery has shoved Lady Cockburn over to the edge of its British gallery to make way for these artists.
But has Reynolds been misunderstood? Is he the victim of his own avant garde boldness? An exhibition opening on Thursday at the Wallace Collection in London shows he took risks – as he did by adding his parrot to a formal portrait – all the time. After examining his works in the National Gallery’s laboratories and comparing his technique with what people said about him in his lifetime, experts have concluded he has been done down.
Mrs Mary Robinson, 1783 - 1784
“Contemporaries talk about him as this experimental painter,” said the exhibition’s co-curator, Mark Hallett. “He talks about his experiments in paint; he talks about his failures. He says his approach means there will be failures as well as successes.”
My ears pricked up at this, because if there’s one certain thing about Reynolds’ paintings it is their total inconsistency. Some of his portraits have faded, blueish-white faces or bubbly crusts, as if they have been boiled. Others look like they were phoned in. And some are majestic. The Wallace Collection owns a full range, from the weird and hideous The Strawberry Girl to his luminous portrait of Nelly O’Brien in sunlight that anticipates the impressionists by more than a century.
Mrs Abington as Miss Prue, 1771
The Wallace Collection’s Reynolds research project, whose findings the new exhibition will make public, has established, through a battery of hi-tech analyses, exactly how experimental Reynolds was. He was constantly trying out new pigments and media, sometimes with bizarre results.
“He does use oil paint, in general, but he adds things to it,” said the project’s paintings conservator, Alex Gent. “Generally what he adds is mastic and resin, so the varnish is mixed into the paint. It’s partly to recreate the translucency of old master paintings.” Sometimes he even added wax to imitate the encaustic painters of ancient Rome. All these impurities led to his paint “cracking”, said Gent.
Even more eccentrically, Reynolds decided that British portraits looked too ruddy-faced, and to get a more subtle flesh tone he used red lake pigment. “But it fades,” Gent said.
So it was routine for Reynolds to have to restore faded portraits. No one seemed too bothered by it. Today the ghostly faces of his failed experiments haunt our galleries, like gothic monsters.
The Strawberry Girl, 1772-3
The image of Reynolds that emerges from the Wallace Collection’s exhibition is a kind of mad scientist, a would-be alchemist of art. It makes for a much more attractive personality than the man who handed down the rules of art in his lectures to the academy. Hallett observed that Reynolds could often speak in an official oratorical tone while, in his letters, he used a much more human one: “witty, playful, idiosyncratic.”
Yet does all this rescue Reynolds as an artist? For me, it does. Reynolds changed British art because he had such vast ambitions for it. When he became founding president of the Royal Academy in 1768 he really believed it could raise British art to the heights of the Renaissance. He was vindicated soon after his death when two of its students, John Constable and JMW Turner, took British painting into the stratosphere. As it happens, one of the research project’s discoveries is that Reynolds used Indian yellow decades before Turner.
Self Portrait Shading the Eyes, 1747-9
Britain in the 1700s was bubbling with commerce, industry and science. The Enlightenment encouraged experiments, from Horace Walpole’s reinvention of the gothic style to Laurence Sterne’s self-deconstructing novel Tristram Shandy. Reynolds stood at the centre of this bold culture, and portrayed its leading lights with brilliant familiarity.
With this new idea of Reynolds in mind, his paintings in the National Portrait Gallery suddenly come alive. He captured the scientist Joseph Banks as a brilliant, passionate, perceptive character. His portrait of Samuel Johnson makes you feel the force of the great man of letters. He portrayed Walpole as a strange genius, and gave Sterne an almost demonic mask of a face.
These are great paintings. Reynolds is not remote or staid at all. He’s the portraitist of the Enlightenment, a daring artist who captured a daring age.
Joshua Reynolds: Experiments in Paint, Wallace Collection, 12 March to 7 June, admission free
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/mar/09/joshua-reynolds-wallace-collection-exhibition
An exhibition coming to London’s Wallace Collection paints the artist in a new light: as a daring Enlightenment portraitist who became the victim of his own boldness
Jonathan Jones
Monday 9 March 2015
In 1773 the successful portrait artist Joshua Reynolds painted the aristocratically maternal Lady Cockburn and her three young sons using the methods he preached in his lectures as first president of the Royal Academy.
Study the old masters, Reynolds instructed his students, for “the works of those who have stood the test of ages, have a claim to … respect and veneration to which no modern can pretend”.
In his portrait of Cockburn and her boys Reynolds practised what he preached. He structured his composition with quotations from masterpieces by Van Dyck and Velázquez. Yet Reynolds thought the picture still needed something – so he added a portrait of his huge pet parrot to its classical setting.
Monday 9 March 2015
In 1773 the successful portrait artist Joshua Reynolds painted the aristocratically maternal Lady Cockburn and her three young sons using the methods he preached in his lectures as first president of the Royal Academy.
Study the old masters, Reynolds instructed his students, for “the works of those who have stood the test of ages, have a claim to … respect and veneration to which no modern can pretend”.
In his portrait of Cockburn and her boys Reynolds practised what he preached. He structured his composition with quotations from masterpieces by Van Dyck and Velázquez. Yet Reynolds thought the picture still needed something – so he added a portrait of his huge pet parrot to its classical setting.
Lady Cockburn and her Three Eldest Sons, 1773
Nowadays Reynolds’ parrot is by far the most engaging part of this picture, which hangs in the National Gallery. The flamboyant red, blue and yellow bird lives in a way Cockburn does not.
If only Reynolds had followed his eccentric whims more often. If only he had painted parrots instead of posh people, and done so spontaneously instead of eruditely, he might be an artist the modern world could love.
Sir Joshua Reynolds, who was born in 1723 and died in 1792, was the most famous and honoured artist of his time, a figure so central to British art history that his statue still greets visitors to the Royal Academy. But modern eyes find his contemporaries infinitely more interesting. The scientific dramas of Joseph Wright of Derby, the intense, almost surreal animal portraits of George Stubbs, and the sensuality of Thomas Gainsborough make Reynolds look dull by comparison. The National Gallery has shoved Lady Cockburn over to the edge of its British gallery to make way for these artists.
But has Reynolds been misunderstood? Is he the victim of his own avant garde boldness? An exhibition opening on Thursday at the Wallace Collection in London shows he took risks – as he did by adding his parrot to a formal portrait – all the time. After examining his works in the National Gallery’s laboratories and comparing his technique with what people said about him in his lifetime, experts have concluded he has been done down.
“Contemporaries talk about him as this experimental painter,” said the exhibition’s co-curator, Mark Hallett. “He talks about his experiments in paint; he talks about his failures. He says his approach means there will be failures as well as successes.”
My ears pricked up at this, because if there’s one certain thing about Reynolds’ paintings it is their total inconsistency. Some of his portraits have faded, blueish-white faces or bubbly crusts, as if they have been boiled. Others look like they were phoned in. And some are majestic. The Wallace Collection owns a full range, from the weird and hideous The Strawberry Girl to his luminous portrait of Nelly O’Brien in sunlight that anticipates the impressionists by more than a century.
Mrs Abington as Miss Prue, 1771
The Wallace Collection’s Reynolds research project, whose findings the new exhibition will make public, has established, through a battery of hi-tech analyses, exactly how experimental Reynolds was. He was constantly trying out new pigments and media, sometimes with bizarre results.
“He does use oil paint, in general, but he adds things to it,” said the project’s paintings conservator, Alex Gent. “Generally what he adds is mastic and resin, so the varnish is mixed into the paint. It’s partly to recreate the translucency of old master paintings.” Sometimes he even added wax to imitate the encaustic painters of ancient Rome. All these impurities led to his paint “cracking”, said Gent.
Even more eccentrically, Reynolds decided that British portraits looked too ruddy-faced, and to get a more subtle flesh tone he used red lake pigment. “But it fades,” Gent said.
So it was routine for Reynolds to have to restore faded portraits. No one seemed too bothered by it. Today the ghostly faces of his failed experiments haunt our galleries, like gothic monsters.
The Strawberry Girl, 1772-3
The image of Reynolds that emerges from the Wallace Collection’s exhibition is a kind of mad scientist, a would-be alchemist of art. It makes for a much more attractive personality than the man who handed down the rules of art in his lectures to the academy. Hallett observed that Reynolds could often speak in an official oratorical tone while, in his letters, he used a much more human one: “witty, playful, idiosyncratic.”
Yet does all this rescue Reynolds as an artist? For me, it does. Reynolds changed British art because he had such vast ambitions for it. When he became founding president of the Royal Academy in 1768 he really believed it could raise British art to the heights of the Renaissance. He was vindicated soon after his death when two of its students, John Constable and JMW Turner, took British painting into the stratosphere. As it happens, one of the research project’s discoveries is that Reynolds used Indian yellow decades before Turner.
Self Portrait Shading the Eyes, 1747-9
Britain in the 1700s was bubbling with commerce, industry and science. The Enlightenment encouraged experiments, from Horace Walpole’s reinvention of the gothic style to Laurence Sterne’s self-deconstructing novel Tristram Shandy. Reynolds stood at the centre of this bold culture, and portrayed its leading lights with brilliant familiarity.
With this new idea of Reynolds in mind, his paintings in the National Portrait Gallery suddenly come alive. He captured the scientist Joseph Banks as a brilliant, passionate, perceptive character. His portrait of Samuel Johnson makes you feel the force of the great man of letters. He portrayed Walpole as a strange genius, and gave Sterne an almost demonic mask of a face.
These are great paintings. Reynolds is not remote or staid at all. He’s the portraitist of the Enlightenment, a daring artist who captured a daring age.
Joshua Reynolds: Experiments in Paint, Wallace Collection, 12 March to 7 June, admission free
Joshua Reynolds: Experiments in Paint
Thursday 12th March, 2015 - Sunday 7th June, 2015Price: Admission Free
"To John Constable's generation, Reynolds was the greatest modern artist" - The Guardian. Join us for an exhibition that provides a fresh perspective on a towering figure of British painting.
Joshua Reynolds is widely regarded as one of the greatest portraitists of the 18th century. Celebrated for capturing the leading figures and glitterati of his day, he also helped establish a distinctive British school of painting. However, Reynolds’s reputation as an ‘establishment’ artist masks his unquenchable thirst for innovation and his experimental approach to the practice and materials of painting.
Mrs Mary Nesbitt, 1781
This exhibition offers a snapshot of Joshua Reynolds’s creative process, and reveals discoveries made during a four-year research project into the outstanding collection of his works at the Wallace Collection. We have selected not only significant portraits but lesser known ‘fancy pictures’ and a rare history painting, all of which will be shown side by side. Among the works on display will be famous pictures such as Nelly O’Brien, Mrs Abington as Miss Prue and Reynolds’s own Self Portrait Shading the Eyes.
By focusing on the themes of experimentation and innovation, we trace Reynolds’s working practice in two ways: on the material level, through his use of pigments and media; and on a conceptual level, through his development of composition and narrative. What emerges is a vision of Reynolds as a pioneering painter, highly original in his approaches to pictorial composition. This drive to innovation is exemplified in his ambitious allusions to the great masters of the past, such as Titian and Rembrandt and his obsessive tendency to rework and revise his images as he painted.
Kitty Fisher and Parrot, 1783=4
Reynolds’s portraits not only depicted the colourful society in which he lived, ranging from the actress Mrs Abington, the scandalous Kitty Fisher and the ‘social climber’ Mrs Nesbitt, but were often the product of a collaborative relationship between artist and sitter. Reynolds explored the possibilities of performance and role play with the sitters, while at the same time drawing on their colourful biographies to ‘personalise’ their portraiture.
Spanning most of Reynolds’s career, this exhibition demonstrates the sheer diversity of his artistic production and provides an eloquent and surprising insight into the creative processes of this remarkable and immensely prolific British artist.
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