Reynolds

of English portraiture, and indeed of painting in general. The passages previously quoted from Farington and Malone can hardly be regarded as over-florid when we try to imagine the effect of the sudden appearance of a portrait like that of Captain Orme in a country which was absolutely barren of fine painting. It is true that Hogarth had lately wrought several wonderfully vigorous achievements in unconventional portraiture, one or two of which—notably the Bishop of Winchester—are to be seen in an adjoining room at the National Gallery. But Hogarth was never a portrait painter, and admirable as his peculiar qualities were, to compare him with Reynolds is very much like comparing a blacksmith with a sculptor. Hogarth’s brush was like a sledge-hammer; every stroke went home, and his extraordinarily vivid presentments of Lord Boyne, Simon Lord Lovat, Captain Coram, and others seem rather to have been forged than painted—I do not, of course, mean counterfeited! Of other portraiture there was really none, beyond the skill of facial resemblance with which Walpole credits Jonathan Richardson, and the lackadaisical reminiscences of what had been worst in Kneller.

Placed among several of the best works of Reynolds’s maturer period, as it is to-day, the Captain Orme can hardly fail to arrest the attention alike of student or casual visitor. Whatever technical deficiencies the learned may discover in it—deficiencies which, as we have seen, he was never too ignorant to confess or too indolent to let be—the whole picture is stamped with the character of greatness.

To us there is no strangeness, no surprise, in the originality of the composition, as there was to its first beholders. To us the easy pose of the figure standing beside the horse is only a source of enjoyment, and we feel as it were that there could have been no other possible way of painting the portrait with any success; that that was the one attitude in which Captain Orme appeared to any advantage. We recognise in it the work of a great master without any question as to its place in the history of painting.

But consider what the effect of it must have been on the painters and their patrons at the time of its appearance. Northcote describes the picture as “an effort in composition so new to his barren competitors in art as must have struck them with dismay; for they dared not venture on such perilous flights of invention.” That there is little reason to doubt that Northcote was right in suggesting dismay and timidity as the prevailing emotions of the other painters may be allowed, if but for one moment we can blot out from our minds the existence of all English painting since that time. We can remember the effect produced upon the Academicians by the appearance of Whistler; but in those recent days opinion had been educated to recognise excellencies in painting, and it was only the novelty and disregard of existing convention that disturbed them. In 1750 the painters had had no such education, and they felt the double shock of the revelation of superlative excellence combined with startling novelty.

Not that Reynolds must be regarded in any sense as a revolutionary. It would be truer to say that he was a revivalist. We may smile at Whistler’s naïve “Why drag in Velasquez?” but in the “originality” of Reynolds’s Commodore Keppel and Captain Orme we see no more than the fruits of a great mind fertilised by the continuous study of Vandyck and the Italian masters. In a gallery of the great portraits of the world, these achievements of Reynolds would fall as naturally into line with those of the older masters as the regular productions of the fashionable portrait painters of to-day assimilate with the thousands of pictures amongst which they are hung upon the walls of the Royal Academy. One might have said of them as Shakespeare said of the works of Time:

With all, or even a few, of the splendid series of male portraits, of which these two of Captain Orme and Lord Ligonier may be taken as the beginning, it is impossible to deal in so short a memoir. Among the most magnificent is that of Mr. Fane and his two guardians, from the Earl of Westmorland’s collection, which is now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. This must have been painted at the best period of Reynolds’s career, and shows him at the very top of his achievement in the painting of portraits of men. Not far below it, however, is the Lord Heathfield, which is here reproduced. This was one of the last portraits he painted, and yet shows little signs of diminishing vigour in the artist’s mind or hand.

The Lord Heathfield was exhibited in 1788, with sixteen other portraits, in addition to the Infant Hercules, Muscipula, and the Sleeping Girl. It is now in the National Gallery, and though it has suffered somewhat from injury and retouching, it forms a noble close to the chapter opened, so to speak, nearly thirty years back by the two other warriors, Orme and Ligonier, with whom we started. Constable, taking it as an example of what a picture may express besides the actual likeness of the sitter, aptly describes it as “almost a history of the defence of Gibraltar. The distant sea with a glimpse of the opposite coast expresses the locality, and the cannon, pointed downward, the height of the rock on which the hero stands, with the chain of the massive key of the fortress twice passed round his hand as to secure it in his grasp. He seems to say, ‘I have you, and will keep you!’ ”

With portraits of women Reynolds was even more successful in his early days. Besides the exhibition of pictures in the April of the year 1761, when the Captain Orme and the Lord Ligonier opened the public eyes in wonder at the achievements of the new painter, the marriage and coronation of King George III in September contributed, incidentally, to advance the reputation of Reynolds in the portraiture of women. Of the ten noble and lovely bridesmaids who bore the train of the Queen, three of the most beautiful were painted by him in this year, namely, the Ladies Caroline Russell, Elizabeth Keppel, and Sarah Lenox. The first portrait, which is now at Woburn Abbey, is a half-length; Lady Caroline is seated, in a garden, with a Blenheim spaniel in her lap, presumably the gift of the Duke of Marlborough, whom she married the next year. The other two, at Quidenham and Holland House, are better known from having been mezzotinted. The former is a forecast, as it were, of the famous trio at the National Gallery, Lady Elizabeth being represented at full length, decorating a statue of Hymen. The composition is enriched by the contrast of a negress, who holds up the wreaths of flowers to her mistress.

Lady Sarah Lenox shares the honours of her picture with Lady Susan Strangways and Charles James Fox. She leans from a low window at Holland House to take a dove from Lady Susan, while Fox—then quite a youth—with a manuscript in his hand, urges them to come to a rehearsal of some private theatricals. Of groups such as these it is much to be regretted that Reynolds did not paint more. With his comprehensive knowledge of the Old Masters he was better qualified than any English painter to attempt them, and his youthful achievement of the Eliot group, already mentioned, showed his natural capabilities before he had been to Italy at all. It was possibly because Hogarth, and his minor imitators, had made the “conversation piece” their own, and that when he did paint a group, as the Ladies Waldegrave, or the three ladies decorating a Term of Hymen, he saw no way but “the grand style,” and sought to immortalise rather than to portray so much beauty collected together. With men he was occasionally more prosaic, as is witnessed by the two groups of the Dilettanti Society, now in the basement of the Grafton Gallery; though we know that in this instance he took Paul Veronese as his guide.

Let us now turn to the other two—Lady Elizabeth Keppel and Lady Caroline Russell—as the prototypes of his more usual portraits of ladies, the whole and the half-length.

A complete full-length picture of a woman offers more difficulties of pose, proportion, light, colour, or any other particular, than are overcome by any but a few of the greatest painters. Holbein has given us the Duchess of Milan, and no more; and of all the full-length portraits of Elizabeth and the ladies of her time, how many are there that have any but historical or personal interest? In England Vandyck alone succeeded in painting a picture of a complete woman, and when he was gone the chance of immortality for women—I mean in pictures—was gone too. I can recall no single whole-length portrait of Lely or Kneller that is anything more than a conventional representation of the person.

With the Lady Elizabeth Keppel we are back to Vandyck again. With a painter who could achieve a portrait like this, woman once again had the chance of pictorial salvation, and like the sensible creature that she is, jumped at it without any hesitation. To sit for her portrait was now no longer a duty to her family, a bore, or at best a mere vanity, but a thrill.

Mrs. Bonfoy, one of the daughters of Lord Eliot in the family group of 1746, was among the first to experience it, sitting to Reynolds again for a half-length in 1754. This portrait is still at Port Eliot, and is described by Leslie as “one of his most beautiful female portraits, and in perfect preservation. The lady is painted as a half-length in a green dress, with one hand on her hip, and the head turned, with that inimitable ease and

high-bred grace of which Reynolds was a master beyond all the painters who ever painted women.” This is indeed high praise for what was probably the first female portrait he painted after his return from Italy. But there is no doubt that Reynolds had now acquired enough mastery over his “ignorance” to be capable of producing work which would be comparable with anything he was to do in the future. Tom Taylor notes another half-length painted in the spring of the following year in hardly less glowing terms; it is of Mrs. Molesworth—“a young and lovely brunette, in one of the quaint every-day dresses of the time, closely copied, without the least attempt at ‘idealising’ or ‘generalising,’ with flowers in her hand, a little cap on her head, a prim apron, and a lawn kerchief closely covering her shoulders. It is one of the most attractive of his female portraits, and especially valuable for its literalness.”

That his very earliest works should receive, and indeed deserve, such commendation requires emphasising in order to restore to him a good deal of the credit for the revival of portraiture in England which nowadays is given to his only successful rivals, Gainsborough and Romney. The fascination that Gainsborough’s natural genius throws over his admirers—and Reynolds himself was not entirely unaffected by it—is apt to blind them to the more solid merit of the other, and the fact that Reynolds had achieved so much before Gainsborough had really started painting portraits is apt to be overlooked. In 1751, when Sir Joshua had fairly established his reputation, Gainsborough had only just left his native place and settled in Bath, and it was not until 1774—twenty-one years after Reynolds—that he came to London and seriously competed with him for the public favour. Romney, again, although he was working in London as early as 1761, was never a serious competitor till his return from a two years’ tour in Italy in 1775. For twenty years at least then Reynolds had practically as complete a monopoly of portraiture among the nobility as Kneller had had at the opening of the century, and we have only to think once in forming our estimate of the use he made of it. Scattered throughout our old country mansions in England are hundreds of his works, occasionally in groups as at Lord Lansdowne’s at Bowood, or Lord Albemarle’s at Quidenham, few of which are not prized by their owners as the chief glory of their possessions. In our public galleries are a few comparatively—for the number of his authentic pictures enumerated by Sir Walter Armstrong is something over a thousand—but such as they are, they take their place unquestioned among those of the great masters. Never was an aristocracy more fortunate in their painter.

But youth and beauty and the immortality conferred by Sir Joshua were not exclusive privileges of the nobility. To Lord Mount Edgcumbe and Captain Keppel, Reynolds owed the beginning of his patronage in Court circles, but to the latter he was also indebted for the acquaintance of one of his fairest sitters, Kitty Fisher, the daughter of a German staymaker, who was the most celebrated Traviata of her time. For her biography the reader may refer to Mr. Horace Bleackley’s “Ladies Fair and Frail.” She first sat to Reynolds in April 1759, the portrait being commissioned by Sir Charles Bingham, who was afterwards created Lord Lucan. At that time she was barely twenty years old, and was under the protection of Captain Keppel. Old Lord Ligonier was also one of her many admirers, and is said to have conspired with the King in playing off a joke at the expense of Pitt (Lord Chatham) by introducing Kitty to him at a review in Hyde Park as a foreign Duchess. The King fell in with the idea, and, looking towards Kitty, asked aloud who she was. “Oh, Sir,” said the old General, “the Duchess of N—-, a foreign lady that the Secretary should know.” “Well, well,” said the King, “introduce him.” Lord Ligonier took Pitt up to her and said, “This is Mr. Secretary Pitt—this is Miss Kitty Fisher.” Pitt behaved very well, and without showing the least embarrassment, told her he was sorry he had not known her when he was younger. “For then, Madame,” he concluded, “I should have had the hope of succeeding in your affections; but old and infirm as you now see me I have no other way of avoiding the force of such beauty but by flying from it,” and then hobbled off.

Leslie mentions having seen as many as five portraits of Kitty, which must all have been painted about the same time. In one, a three-quarter length, she holds a dove in her lap. Of this there are three versions, one of which belongs to Earl Crewe, and another to Mr. Lenox of New York (1865).

Another portrait of Kitty is in the possession of Lord Leconfield, at Petworth, Sussex. In this she is leaning with folded arms on a table, facing the painter. This, and a fifth, as Cleopatra dissolving a pearl, are better known by having been mezzotinted. Tom Taylor mentions two more, one belonging to Lord Lansdowne, in profile with a parrot on her forefinger, and another, which he considers the loveliest of all, belonging to Lord Carysfort—an unfinished head in powder and a fly-cap.

Within a couple of years (1761) Reynolds was painting Kitty’s rival, the fascinating Nelly O’Brien, with apparently as much relish and assiduity and even more success. In 1763 he painted the exquisite picture of her which is here reproduced from the original at Hertford House.

It is odd to think of Sir Joshua engaged in painting portrait after portrait of these fascinating but frail ladies with the same care, the same thoroughness, and the same wonderful breadth and seriousness as any of the men and women whose names were foremost in the growing culture and dignity of the nation. With Nelly O’Brien we know that he dined, and the only reason to suppose that he was not on easy terms of familiarity with any of them—if it can be called a reason—is the general dignity of his mind and deportment, as evidenced by his relations with Dr. Johnson, the Burney family, and all the great and learned people of his time. The main thing, however, to be considered is that as an artist he made no difference between the virtuous and the frail. That he was paid for painting them need hardly be mentioned, as that has nothing whatever to do with the question. But that he was as much in earnest with these commissions as with any other is a proof of the perfect balance of his mind, which in view of his sometimes over-academical dignity has rather escaped notice.

In 1770, by which time he was President of the Royal Academy and a knight, he was painting a portrait of Polly Kennedy—for the details of whose tragic history I may again refer the readers to Mr. Bleackley’s book—for Sir Charles Bunbury. “Among the rich collection of pictures by Reynolds at Barton,” says Leslie, “is one representing a young and handsome woman, with aquiline features, marked by the tension of anxiety. One hand is raised and holds a handkerchief. The dress is a rich robe of flowered scarlet and silver brocade, worn over an inner vest of bright colours, with a shawl of green and gold round the waist. It looks like the portrait of an actress, but the veiled look of pain does not belong to the stage; it is meant, I believe, to tell a tale of real and prolonged suffering.”

Whether or not Leslie’s conjecture is justified, it is certain that Sir Joshua wrote to Sir Charles Bunbury about the picture in terms which leave no doubt as to the pains he was at in executing the commission:

In the Exhibition of 1784 there appeared the famous Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse, of which Sir Joshua painted two if not three originals. One is at Grosvenor House, having been purchased in 1822 by the first Marquis of Westminster for 1760 guineas. (At the sale of Reynolds’s pictures in 1796 it fetched £700.) Another is in the Dulwich Gallery, and a third was given by Sir Joshua to Mr. Harvey, of Langley Park, Stowe, in exchange for a picture of a boar hunt by Snyders, which he admired very much. The Dulwich replica (which, according to Northcote, was painted by one of Reynolds’s assistants) was sold by Reynolds in 1789 to M. Desenfans—whose collection formed the bulk of the pictures now in the Dulwich Gallery—for £735.

In this portrait, for once, we can find a certain reminiscence of Reynolds’s visit to Rome, namely in the resemblance of the attitude to that of Michel Angelo’s Isaiah and the two attendant figures. It is recorded that Mrs. Siddons herself told Mr. Phillips “that it was the production of pure accident: Sir Joshua had begun the head and figure in a different view, but while he was occupied in the preparation of some colour she changed her position to look at a picture hanging on the wall of the room. When he again looked at her and saw the action she had assumed he requested her not to move, and thus arose the beautiful and expressive figure we now see in the picture.” But it is easy to understand that a

slight turn of the head and a complete change of the expression, which would involve no alteration in the general pose, is enough to account for this anecdote. Mrs. Siddons is also reputed to have told a Miss Fanshawe, in whose journal the statement is preserved, that she did not think that Sir Joshua painted the duplicate now at Grosvenor House, but that the original was at Dulwich. This contradicts Northcote, and we may reasonably question Miss Fanshawe’s accuracy. Mrs. Siddons very possibly said a great deal about her picture which listeners were not concerned to take too literally, but we should like to believe her implicitly when she said that Sir Joshua intended to work considerably more on the face, but that on her telling him that she thought it quite perfect he deferred to her judgment, and left it as it was at the last sitting.

A misunderstanding as to the engraving of this picture occasioned a letter from Reynolds which is so characteristic of his thoroughness in anything he undertook, as well as being an enjoyable relief in contrast with some of the rather pedantic passages in his “Discourses” and memoranda, that no excuse is needed for reprinting it in full. Valentine Green, its unfortunate recipient, had asked for permission to engrave the picture, and Reynolds had politely told him that his application “should certainly be remembered.” Mrs. Siddons soon afterwards wrote a note to Reynolds expressing a wish that Howard should engrave it, and Sir Joshua very naturally consented. Green then wrote a long and indignant letter to Reynolds, and here is the reply.

With purely historical and subject pictures Sir Joshua may be said to have increased his popularity more than his reputation. Of this class there are comparatively few, for while Malone enumerates one hundred and ten in “a general list of the most considerable,” no less than thirty-five of these are primarily portraits, such as The Graces adorning a Term of Hymen, The Marlborough Family, &c. &c. And while we acknowledge some of his very finest achievements to be portraits and portrait groups treated in this allegorical manner, when we turn to the “fancy subjects” we find little of which the importance is equal to its sentimental charm.

Nor are the most notable exceptions, as might be expected, those for which he received the largest commissions, namely: The Infant Hercules, £1500; The Nativity, £1200; Macbeth, £1000; Cardinal Beaufort, £500; The Continence of Scipio, £500; A Holy Family, £500; Count Hugolino, £400; A Gipsy Telling Fortunes, £350; Tuccia, the Vestal Virgin, £300.

The Infant Hercules was commenced in January 1786, at a time, that is to say, when he was at the very height of his power. His niece, Miss Palmer, writing to a cousin abroad during this month, says: “My uncle seems more bewitched than ever with his pallet and pencils. He is painting from morning till night, and the truth is that every picture that he does seems better than the former. He is just going to begin a picture for the Empress of Russia, who has sent to desire he will paint her an historical one. The subject is left to his own choice, and at present he is undetermined what to choose.”

The picture is now in St. Petersburg, and we

only know it from engravings. Tom Taylor considered it “a confused straggling picture, quite beyond the power of the painter to manage.” But this is scarcely the criticism it deserves, and we prefer the more adulatory notices of his contemporaries. In the Exhibition of 1788—the last but two in which Reynolds was represented—it was hung over the chimney-piece. “It was the first picture which presented itself on entering the room,” says Northcote, “and had the most splendid effect of any picture I ever saw.... It was a large and grand composition, and in respect to beauty, colour, and expression was equal to any picture known in the world. The middle group, which received the principal light, was exquisite in the highest degree.” James Barry was no less enthusiastic over it: “Nothing can exceed the brilliancy of light, the force and vigorous effect ... it possesses all that we look for and are accustomed to admire in Rembrandt, united to beautiful forms and to an elevation of mind to which Rembrandt had no pretensions; the prophetical agitation of Tiresias and Juno, enveloped with clouds, hanging over the scene like a black pestilence, can never be too much admired, and is, indeed, truly sublime.”

The Nativity, which he painted in 1779, was purchased by the Duke of Rutland at the then unheard of price of £1200. Unfortunately it perished in a fire at Belvoir Castle, and we only know it from the engraving, and from the rendering of it in glass by Jervas as the central part of the western window of New College, Oxford. But it is doubtful whether the loss is as great as it is deplorable, in view of the opinions expressed by at least two not unfriendly critics. Mason tells us that “the day of opening the Exhibition that year when the picture was in hand approached too hastily upon Sir Joshua, who had resolved that it should then make its public appearance. I saw him at work upon it, even the very day before it was to be sent thither; and it grieved me to see him laying loads of colour and varnish upon it....” Benjamin Haydon when the whole series was exhibited in 1821, allowing that they are unequalled by any series of allegorical designs painted by an English master, and that the Charity in particular is “very lovely,” and “may take its place triumphantly by any Correggio on earth,” is merciless to The Nativity. He condemns it for “having emptiness as breadth, plastering for surface, and portrait individuality for general nature.”

The Macbeth, which was commenced just a year after The Infant Hercules, was a commission from Alderman Boydell—half of which, by-the-by, was paid in advance—as part of the scheme for the Shakespeare Gallery. The Cardinal Beaufort was the same. Neither can be said to have advanced Sir Joshua’s reputation or even his popularity as much as the Puck, which was purchased by Boydell for inclusion in the Shakespeare series, although not originally intended for it.

The Continence of Scipio followed the Hercules to Russia. The Holy Family, which was commissioned by Macklin for a Bible illustration, has lately been restored and rehung in the National Gallery. It was for long supposed to have suffered beyond repair, but the restorer, if he has not done too much to it, has certainly not done too little, and it now presents an appearance which attracts to it a greater amount of attention from the casual visitor than from the student.

In his minor works of this class, however, there is much more both to charm and to satisfy. If his children have not quite the same spontaneous gaiety of Gainsborough’s, they have many other qualities and distinctions which Gainsborough’s lack. With the Heads of Angels and The Age of Innocence Reynolds is sure of his public in any period.

The Strawberry Girl, as Sir Joshua always maintained, was one of the “half-dozen original things” which he declared no man ever exceeded in his life’s work. He repeated the picture several times. Lord Carysfort bought the original from the Exhibition of 1773 for £50, but at the sale of Samuel Rogers’ collection it was bought by the Marquis of Hertford for 2100 guineas.

To realise the full extent of England’s debt to Reynolds one must read his “Discourses” as well as look at his pictures. It is in passages such as the concluding paragraph of his farewell address to the Academy students that we find the real secrets of his success. Speaking of Michel Angelo, he says: “It will not, I hope, be thought presumptuous in me to appear in the train, I cannot say of his imitators, but of his admirers. I have taken another course, one more suited to my abilities and to the taste of the times in which I live. Yet however unequal I feel myself to that attempt, were I now to begin the world

again I would tread in the steps of that great master; to kiss the hem of his garment, to catch the slightest of his perfections would be glory and distinction enough for an ambitious man.

“I feel a self-congratulation in knowing myself capable of such sensations as he intended to excite. I reflect, not without vanity, that these discourses bear testimony of my admiration of that truly divine man, and I should desire that the last words which I should pronounce in this Academy and from this place might be the name of—Michel Angelo.”

INDEX

A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, J, K, L, M, N, P, R, S, T, V, W

“An Argument in behalf of the Science of a Connoisseur,” 8
Armstrong, Sir Walter, 39

Bleackley’s, Horace, “Ladies Fair and Frail,” 39
British Painting in the Eighteenth Century, 2
Burke, Edmund, 16
Burney Family, 41

Catts’, Jacob, Book of Emblems, 6
Chudleigh, Miss, commissioned to paint, 9

Dilettanti Society, 35
Dulwich Gallery, 44

Elizabeth, Queen, 36
“English Society of the Eighteenth Century in Contemporary Art,” 10

Farington, Joseph, R.A., 20
Fisher, Kitty, 39

Gainsborough, Thomas, 14, 37, 51

Hogarth, William, 2, 11, 39
Portrait of Bishop of Winchester, 29
Holbein’s Duchess of Milan, 35
Hoppner, 14
Hudson, Thomas, 8, 20

Johnson, Samuel, 17, 41

Keppel, Captain, invites Reynolds to accompany him to the Mediterranean, 12

Lawrence, Sir Thomas, 14
Lucan, Lord, 39

Malone, Edmund, 16, 21, 47
Marlborough Group, 11
Mason’s “Observations on Sir Joshua Reynolds’ Method of Colouring,” 22
Metastasio, 25
Michel Angelo, 14, 15, 52
Morland, George, 16
Mudge, Rev. Zachariah, 17

Northcote, James, R.A., 9, 31, 45, 49

Pictures by Sir Joshua Reynolds
A Gipsy telling Fortunes, 48
A Holy Family, 48
Boy in a Turban, 20
Captain Keppel, 20, 22, 30, 31
Captain Orme, 28, 30, 31, 32, 33
Cardinal Beaufort, 48, 51
Charity, 50
Continence of Scipio, 48, 51
Conversation Piece, 10
Count Hugolino, 48
Heads of Angels, 52
Infant Hercules, 33, 48, 49, 51
Kitty Fisher, 39
Ladies Sarah Lenox, Susan Strangways, and Charles James Fox, 34
Ladies Waldegrave, 35
Lady Caroline Russell, 35
Lady Elizabeth Keppel, 34, 35, 36
Lord Heathfield, 32
Lord Holderness, 22
Lord Ligonier, 28, 32, 33
Lords Huntingdon and Stormont, 22
Macbeth, 48, 51
Mr. Fane and his Two Guardians, 32
Mrs. Bonfoy, 36
Mrs. Molesworth, 37
Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse, 43
Muscipula, 33
Nelly O’Brien, 41
Pitt (Lord Chatham), 39
Polly Kennedy, 42
Puck, 51
Sleeping Girl, 33
The Age of Innocence, 52
The Graces adorning a Term of Hymen, 47
The Marlborough Family, 47
The Nativity, 48, 50
The Strawberry Girl, 52
Tuccia, the Vestal Virgin, 48
Plympton, Birthplace of Reynolds, 5

Reynolds, Sir Joshua, birth of, 5
drawing of Plympton School, 7
early efforts, 5
effects of his studies in Italy, 19
England’s debt to, 52
entries in his pocket-book, 28
introduction to Captain Keppel, 11
lecturing at the Academy, 14
letter to Sir Charles Bunbury, 43
letter to Valentine Green, 46
memoranda of his efforts in Beechey’s Memoir, 24
painting The Infant Hercules, 48
portrait of himself, 9
President of the Royal Academy, 42
prices obtained for pictures commissioned, 48
residence in Italy, 12
sent to London, 8
settled at Plymouth, 9
studied under Thomas Hudson, 8
success and continued improvement, 25
three years’ tour, 19
Leslie and Taylor’s Life of, 16
Reynolds, Rev. Samuel, 5
Richardson, Jonathan, 7, 29
“Essay on the whole Art of Criticism as it relates to Painting,” 8
“An argument in behalf of the Science of Connoisseur,” 8
Romney, George, 14, 37, 38

Shakespeare, Quotation from, 32
Siddons, Mrs., story of her portrait by Sir Joshua, 44

Taylor, Tom, 37, 41, 49
Thornhill, Sir James, 2

Veronese, Paul, 35

Walpole, Horace, 8
West, Benjamin, 15
Westmorland, Earl of, Collection, 32

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