Hired to Depress: A Digital Scholarly Edition of William Blake's Annotations to Sir Joshua Reynolds' Discourses

Reynolds's posthumous reputation

Four years after his death, in 1796, Reynolds's executors disposed of the contents of his studio by auction, including all those works not retained by his niece (whose collection was sold after her death in 1821). The most expensive works in these early sales were subject pictures, which were still considered by Reynolds's acolytes to be his most important works. In 1813 the first retrospective exhibition of over 200 of Reynolds's pictures was mounted by the British Institution in Pall Mall. Although the exhibition was lauded by the mainstream press, the essayist Charles Lamb, writing in The Examiner, used the occasion to attack Reynolds's history paintings, in particular Ugolino and the Death of Cardinal Beaufort. ‘The one stares and the other grins’, he observed, ‘but is there common dignity in the countenances?’ (Postle,Subject Pictures, 293). Over the next two years Reynolds's reputation as a history painter was further undermined in a series of revisionist essays written by William Hazlitt in the radical periodical The Champion. While Hazlitt claimed to have no wish to undermine Reynolds's position as founder of the contemporary British school, he stressed that Reynolds's reputation had been inflated by the uncritical attitude of his friends and the vagaries of fashion. In 1797 Edmond Malone had published two volumes of Reynolds's collected writings, prefaced by a short, laudatory, biographical essay. In 1813–15 James Northcote published the first major biography of Reynolds, which he revised and expanded in a two-volume edition of 1818. In his biography Northcote provided a positive account of his former master's professional career and achievement. However, during the 1820s, in a series of published conversations with Hazlitt, he was far more critical, not least about Reynolds's personal life and character. While Hazlitt confessed that he had exaggerated Northcote's views and even invented some of the opinions attributed to him, his writings none the less contributed to a less reverent attitude towards Reynolds, notably in Allan Cunningham's scurrilous biographical essay of 1829, which appeared in the first volume of his populist Lives of the most Eminent British Painters.

Reynolds's reputation, although it was tarnished by the writings of Hazlitt and Cunningham, continued to rise during the second half of the nineteenth century. In 1865 The Life and Times of Sir Joshua Reynolds was published, co-authored by the American artist Charles Robert Leslie and the critic Tom Taylor (who completed the volume following Leslie's death in 1859). Leslie's and Taylor's biography, which contained a great deal of contextual matter on Reynolds's friendships and the politics of the period, reasserted the artist's position as a central figure in the Georgian cultural milieu, as well as suggesting for the first time (largely through Taylor's input) Reynolds's close allegiance to the whig party. Major exhibitions of Reynolds's work continued to appear, notably that mounted at the Grosvenor Gallery in the winter of 1883, which was accompanied by a lavish catalogue by F. G. Stephens, who had also published, in 1867, English Children as Painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds, a book which, in turn, reflected the immense popularity of the artist's child portraits. Indeed, the appeal of Reynolds's child portraiture to Victorian sentiment is reflected by the fact that The Age of Innocence (Tate collection) was copied full-size in oils no fewer than 323 times between 1856 and 1893. During the final decades of the nineteenth century prices for Reynolds's portraits, which had been steadily rising, reached new records, Lord Rothschild paying over £20,000 for Garrick between Tragedy and Comedy in 1886.

In 1900 the first catalogue raisonné of Reynolds's paintings, A History of the Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds, was published in four volumes by the picture dealer Algernon Graves and William Vine Cronin. This magisterial tome, containing detailed biographies of the artist's sitters and excerpts from contemporary criticism, provided an invaluable basis for Reynolds scholarship over the next hundred years. During the earlier decades of the twentieth century the most significant contribution to Reynolds studies was made by the American scholar Frederick Hilles, who in 1929 edited the first edition of the artist's letters. This was followed up, in 1936, by The Literary Career of Sir Joshua Reynolds, a pioneering study of the making of Reynolds's Discourses and the artist's other writings, and, in 1952, by Portraits … of Sir Joshua Reynolds, consisting of hitherto unpublished essays and notes by Reynolds discovered among the private papers of James Boswell. The greatest apologist for Reynolds's art in the twentieth century was Sir Ellis Waterhouse, who in 1941 published a book which, as he stated, illustrated ‘the bulk of Sir Joshua's major work in portraiture from the beginning of his career to the end’ (Waterhouse, Reynolds, 1941, ix). Waterhouse's writings on Reynolds were largely confined to short essays, and to the artist's portraits. However, his unrivalled firsthand knowledge of the paintings, combined with his generosity to fellow scholars, ensured that he dominated Reynolds studies until his death in 1986. That year also marked the biggest exhibition of Reynolds's art mounted in the twentieth century, which was held at the Royal Academy, London. This exhibition in turn sparked new initiatives, notably the project for a new catalogue raisonné of Reynolds's oil paintings, which was published by David Mannings (with Martin Postle) in 2000. However, while scholarly interest in Reynolds has been reinvigorated in recent years, this has not been matched either by a rise in public appeal, or by saleroom prices, which have remained below those of contemporaries such as Stubbs, Zoffany, Gainsborough, and Wright of Derby. A marked exception is Reynolds's Omai (Tate collection), which sold at Sothebys on 29 November 2001 for £10.3 million.

Written by Martin Postle
 

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