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Article

Reynolds, Joshua (Sir)  

Publication History:

Published online:
31 October 2011
Collection:
Benezit Dictionary of Artists

British, 18th century, male.

Born 16 July 1723, in Plympton (Devon); died 23 February 1792, in London.

Painter, draughtsman, art theorist, art critic, collector. History painting, allegorical subjects, mythological subjects, portraits fancy pictures.

Royal Academy of Arts.

Joshua Reynolds was educated at Plympton Grammar School in Devon, where his clergyman father, Samuel Reynolds, was a master. It was intended that Joshua would study medicine, but eventually he moved to London in 1740 to work for the then fashionable (and conventional) portraitist Thomas Hudson....

Article

Reynolds, Sir Joshua  

David Mannings

Publication History:

Published online:
2003
Collection:
Grove Art Online

(b Plympton, Devon, July 16, 1723; d London, Feb 23, 1792).

English painter, collector and writer. The foremost portrait painter in England in the 18th century, he transformed early Georgian portraiture by greatly enlarging its range. His poses, frequently based on the Old Masters or antique sculpture, were intended to invoke classical values and to enhance the dignity of his sitters. His rich colour, strong lighting and free handling of paint greatly influenced the generation of Thomas Lawrence and Henry Raeburn. His history and fancy pictures explored dramatic and emotional themes that became increasingly popular with both artists and collectors in the Romantic period. As first president of the Royal Academy in London, he did more than anyone to raise the status of art and artists in Britain. His Discourses on Art, delivered to the students and members of the Academy between 1769 and 1790, are the most eloquent and widely respected body of art criticism by any English writer.

Although Reynolds’s father, a fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, and master of Plympton Grammar School, had intended that his son train as an apothecary, Joshua chose instead to seek fame as a painter. In ...

Article

Richardson, Jonathan  

David Rodgers

Publication History:

Published online:
2003
Collection:
Grove Art Online

(b London, 1665; d Bloomsbury, May 28, 1745).

English painter, writer and collector. He trained as a portrait painter in the studio of John Riley, later marrying Riley’s niece and living in his house until Riley’s death. The double portrait of Lady Catherine Herbert and her Brother Robert (1698; Wilton House, Wilts), among the finest of his early works, owes an obvious debt to Riley, but by 1711, when Richardson painted Thomas Watson-Wentworth, 1st Marquess of Rockingham (Cambridge, St John’s Coll.), he had developed his own style. Tighter and more formal than that of his master, with a smooth finish described by Sir Joshua Reynolds as ‘cold and hard’, it was better suited to male than female sitters, and his most successful female portrait is that of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1719; Sandon Park, Staffs, priv. col.), a woman of strong mind and independent opinions. Richardson’s career prospered and by 1731 he was described by Vertue as one of the three foremost masters of the day with Charles Jervas and Michael Dahl, and could charge 20 guineas a head and 70 for a full-length; he was certainly the leading London portrait painter after the death of Sir Godfrey Kneller in ...