CORNELL 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 FINE ARTS LIBRARY 
 
Cornall University Library 
 ND 497.R46K26 1902 
 
 Sir Joshua Reynolds P. R. A. 
 
 3 1924 014 894 251 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of tliis bool< is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924014894251 
 
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The Makers of British Art 
 
 Edited by JAMES A. MANSON 
 
 Sir Joshua Reynolds, P.R.A. 
 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. 
 
 This Series, in superior leather bindings, may be had on 
 application to the Publishers. 
 
Sir 
 
 Joshua Reynolds 
 
 P.R.A. 
 
 BY 
 
 Elsa D'Esterre-Keeling 
 
 With One Photogravure Portrait, and Twenty 
 i^^ Plates after Reynolds 
 
Preface. 
 
 Though the writer of a Life of Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 to-day has not much scope for the play of originality, 
 the present book is an attempt at achieving something 
 on the one part less bulky, and on the other part less 
 meagre, than the Lives of Sir Joshua Reynolds heretofore 
 published. 
 
 The "new" attitude towards Sir Joshua's work is 
 here dealt with, and the writer, who is neither so 
 uncritical towards it as are some, nor yeit so lacking 
 in appreciation of it as are others, has tried to accord 
 to it a frank treatment. In two instances a per- 
 sonal stand is taken: in Chapter, VIL, which treats 
 of Sir Joshua Reynolds as teacher and writer, and in 
 Chapter XIIL, which treats of him as painter and man. 
 Here opinion for and opinion against are weighed, and 
 the writer's conclusions are stated. 
 
 To make the book of use to the student, it is supplied 
 with appendices dealing severally with the chronology 
 of Reynolds's life, with his pictures in public galleries in 
 London, with the engravings of his paintings, with a 
 bibliography, and a full alphabetical index. As regards 
 the chronology of the paintings, the amplest information 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 procurable will be found in Messrs. Graves and Cronin's 
 History of the Works of Sir foshua Reynolds, P.R.A. 
 (1899). 
 
 In this book, as the chapter-headings show, the 
 pictures of Reynolds are treated in chronological order, 
 the only important deviation made from this arrange- 
 ment being that in the case of portraits of the same 
 person made during several years, the account of the 
 first portrait is followed by an account of succeeding 
 ones. 
 
 The Index will be found to contain names of all 
 pictures of first, second, and even third importance, and 
 a reference to it will enable the reader to date these 
 works. In a short account of the life-work of a man 
 who painted pictures to the number of thousands, it 
 was necessary to select, but it was found possible to 
 deal with a very large number of them. The following 
 chapter-headings give a chronological survey of Sir 
 Joshua Reynolds's work: — His first "great" picture 
 (Admiral Keppel, 1753); Portraits of the later 'fifties 
 (the first portrait of Johnson, and other portraits) ; 
 Portraits of the early 'sixties (Sterne, and others) ; Por- 
 traits of the later 'sixties (Goldsmith, and others); 
 Portraits of the early 'seventies (" Lg.dy Cockburn and 
 her Children," and others); Portraits of the later 
 'seventies ("The Marlborough Family" picture, and 
 others); Portraits of the early 'eighties (" Mrs. Siddons 
 as the Tragic Muse," and others); Portraits of the 
 later 'eighties ("Angels' Heads," and others). 
 
 An account of Reynolds's life being necessarily little 
 vi 
 
Preface 
 
 more than a record of his work at his easel, it was 
 deemed best to treat the subject in semi-decades, the 
 work of which should be set forth with as much detail 
 as might be combined with prominence given to the 
 best-known picture of the five years in question. 
 
 It should be explained that the Plates have been 
 arranged at equal intervals throughout the book, 
 principally to avoid the awkwardness of placing several 
 of them too closely together at certain points. But the 
 actual page where the descriptive text will be found has 
 been noted on each, so that reference will be easy. 
 
 E. D'E.-K. 
 May igo3. 
 
Contents. 
 
 CHAP. FACE 
 
 I.— Youth and Young Manhood at Home . i 
 
 II. — Foreign Travel 22 
 
 III.— First "Great" Picture 27 
 
 IV. — First Portrait of Johnson, and other 
 
 Pictures of the Later 'Fifties . 40 
 
 v.— Portraits of the Early 'Sixties: Sterne 
 
 AND Others 56 
 
 VI.— Portraits of the Later 'Sixties : Gold- 
 smith AND Others 68 
 
 ,VIL— Sir Joshua Reynolds as Teacher and 
 
 Writer 90 
 
 VIII.— Portraits of the Early 'Seventies: "Lady 
 Cockburn and her Children," and 
 
 Others 104 
 
 IX.— Portraits of the Later 'Seventies: "The 
 
 Marlborough Family," and Others . 128 
 X.— Portraits of the Early 'Eighties : " Mrs. 
 Siddons as the Tragic Muse," and 
 
 Others i44 
 
 ix 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 CHAP. PAGE 
 
 XL— Portraits of the Later 'Eighties: 
 
 "Angels' Heads," and Others . .163 
 
 XIL— The End 182 
 
 XIIL— Sir Joshua Reynolds: the Painter and 
 
 THE Man 186 
 
 APPENDICES. 
 
 L— Chronology of the Life of Sir Joshua 
 
 Reynolds 205 
 
 I L— Reynolds's Pictures in Public Galleries 
 
 in London 207 
 
 1 1 L— Engravings of Reynolds's Paintings . .211 
 
 IV.— Bibliography 215 
 
 v.— Index 218 
 
List of Illustrations. 
 
 (The illustrations are chosen with a view to presenting the 
 painter's development with the lapse of years.) 
 
 Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 Frontisj. 
 
 iece 
 
 Boy Reading (p. 13) 
 
 . To face page 
 
 24 
 
 Mrs. Chambers (p. 25) 
 
 ' ») 
 
 32 
 
 Admiral Keppel (p. 28) . 
 
 « 
 
 40 
 
 Lady Waldegrave (p. 53) 
 
 }) 
 
 48 
 
 Kitty Fisher (p. 51) 
 
 )j 
 
 56 
 
 Sterne (p. 59) • • • 
 
 )) 
 
 64 
 
 Young Fox with Ladies (p. .59) . 
 
 )) 
 
 72 
 
 Nelly O'Brien (p. 58) 
 
 jj 
 
 80 
 
 Goldsmith (p. 71) . 
 
 5> 
 
 88 
 
 Angelica Kauffmann (p. 73) 
 
 )J 
 
 96 
 
 Strawberry Girl (p. 119) 
 
 JJ 
 
 104 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 Dr. Johnson (p. 46) 
 
 To face page 112 
 
 Lady Cockburn and her Children (p. 133) 
 
 Sir Joshua Reynolds (p. 14) 
 
 The Waldegrave Sisters (p. 147) 
 
 Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse (p. 155) 
 
 Angels' Heads (p. 170) 
 
 Lord Heathfield (p. 173) . 
 
 Simplicity (p. 177) . 
 
 Age of Innocence (p. 178) 
 
 120 
 128 
 136 
 144 
 152 
 160 
 168 
 176 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 YOUTH AND YOUNG MANHOOD. 
 [1723-49.] 
 
 There is no more important year in the history of 
 British art than the year 1723, for in it died Kneller, 
 the last of a series of foreigners who had held sway 
 in art in England — it will suffice to name three of 
 Kneller's predecessors : Zucchero, Vandyke, and Letyj — 
 and in it there was born the painter who was to win 
 for himself the name of the father of British art, 
 destined in his work for the first time to gain the suf- 
 frage of the whole world for a painter of English 
 nationality. 
 
 One of his biographers represents Reynolds as the 
 sixth child of his parents, and another represents him 
 as the tenth. He was the seventh child of eleven. 
 Here is his own entry of his birth in a commonplace 
 book kept by him, and containing among other things 
 what has been described as part of a family record 
 evidently copied from the family Bible: — 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 " 1723, July 16. — Thursday, about J^ an hour after 
 nine in the morning, I, Joshua Reynolds, was born. 
 Godfathers, Uncle Joshua (Mr. Aldwyn, proxy), Mr. 
 Joie; Godmother, Aunt Reynolds of Exeter (Mrs. 
 Darby, proxy)." 
 
 Accounts vary regarding his father's motive in giving 
 him the name Joshua. A legend which has been traced 
 to Bishop Percy has it that this Scriptural name was 
 given to the boy in the hope that some enthusiast of the 
 same name would leave him a fortune. Northcote, on 
 the other hand, records that the child had an uncle 
 named Joshua, who, it was thought, might remember 
 his name in his will. This uncle, it has been seen, was 
 one of his godfathers. Both reasons would point to a 
 sense on the part of the boy's father of possible favours to 
 come, and the parent of so many children is not perhaps 
 to be blamed for not being quite incircumspect in regard 
 to them. Subsequent events make it plain that no en- 
 thusiast named Joshua dowered Joshua Reynolds with a 
 fortune, and also that his uncle did not make good the 
 paternal hopes. 
 
 Perhaps the oddest feature in connection with the 
 Christian name of Reynolds is that he was baptised in 
 one name and entered in the parish register in another. 
 As one of his biographers puts it, "the Joshua of all 
 the rest of the world is a Joseph at Plympton." Probably 
 all the rest of the world now holds that the name Joshua, 
 sits better upon Reynolds than would the name Joseph, 
 so strong is the persuasive power of the actual; yet 
 to call to mind the primal Joseph is to call to mind one 
 
Parents 
 
 of many children who rose from a lowly estate to a 
 high one, and who owed his eminence not a little to a 
 manner complying and bland. It might not be easy to 
 find so many meeting-points between Reynolds and the 
 primal Joshua. 
 
 As last word here on the subject of the name Joshua, 
 let it be called to mind that Edmund Burke in after-days 
 averred that it seemed one made for knighthood. 
 
 Of Reynolds's mother little is known beyond the fact 
 that her name was Theophila, and that she was called 
 "Offy." The name and the pet-name were 
 transmitted to one of her daughters — the 
 one who died as a baby of a fall from a window; 
 to her granddaughter, Sir Joshua's loved niece Theo- 
 phila, in his naming of her "Offy"; and to the daughter 
 of this Theophila, again a Theophila called "Offy." Of 
 course hypothesis has busied itself with the niother 
 of Joshua Reynolds, whose male biographers with 
 uniform gallantry assume that she illustrated the 
 common case with the mothers of great men. The 
 present writer is well pleased to think of her as a 
 notable woman. 
 
 I It is unfortunately not possible to see a notable man 
 in the father of Joshua Reynolds, the indolent, kindly 
 parson of Plympton. " His father and grandfather," 
 says Leslie of the painter, "were clergymen — his 
 mother and her mother were daughters of clergy- 
 men — and two of his father's brothers were in holy 
 orders." His family was one which had numbered 
 ^many good men of religion in it, and of them was 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 undoubtedly Reynolds's father, the godly, easy-going 
 Samuel, of little grit and less wit, yet wit enough to 
 write the following epigram upon his wife's name 
 Theophila : — 
 
 "When I say 'The,' 
 Thou must make tea — 
 Whenlsay'Offy,' 
 Thou must make cofTee.'' 
 
 The great commander, Alexander, could not have com- 
 manded more commandingly; yet no one is to imagine 
 — for that would be to go against all tradition — that 
 the Plympton parson ever ceased to be a very gentle 
 husband and a very kindly father. 
 
 In connection with the family history of Reynolds, it 
 must be pointed out that he had on the paternal side 
 a Dutch grandmother, and had by just so 
 -^ much a Dutchman in him. Little has ever 
 
 . been said by his admirers of this fact. 
 
 " It was pleasing to national pride," writes 
 one of his biographers, "to see an Englishman measure 
 himself successfully with Lely and Vandyke." It was 
 pardonable that this Englishman's contemporaries 
 should overlook the fact that not only had he Dutch 
 blood in his veins, but that he received his first strong 
 impulse to become a painter by fluttering the leaves of 
 a Dutch classic illustrated with Dutch prints, an heir- 
 loom in his family, the original possessor of which had 
 been his Dutch ancestress. 
 
 Reynolds's childhood would seem to have been visited 
 
Children 
 
 by no more than the usual number of ills that flesh was 
 then heir to. Small-pox was a common nursery ailment 
 in Georgian days, and at eleven years of age the boy 
 Joshua had an attack of this malady which left its 
 marks on his face for life. 
 
 As usual with children of artistic propensities, he 
 early showed them, and he does not seem to have en- 
 countered any serious parental opposition to . . 
 his drawing bent. "This is wonderful," so 
 his father is recorded to have said of a draw- . " 
 ing made by him at eight years of age. ^ 
 Not that the schoolmaster-parson — and the Reverend 
 Samuel Reynolds acted in that dual character at 
 Plympton — approved of drawings made out of season. 
 " Done by Joshua out of pure idleness " was his censure 
 written on the back of such a production. So little, on 
 the whole, however, was the hoy-artist coerced, that 
 under his father's eyes he drew likenesses of his sisters 
 and of various friends of the family. 
 
 As regards his early reading, a child brought up in a 
 parsonage could not well lack books, and reading filled 
 much of the time of young Joshua. Among 
 works read by him in childhood were Richard- ^ • 
 
 son's Treatise on Painting and The Jesuit's ^ 
 
 Perspective. The last-named book he is stated to have 
 read when he was some eight years old. The thing, if 
 true, remains remarkable even when brought into line 
 with what is put on record of Coleridge, who in another 
 Devonshire parsonage in another generation was, ac- 
 cording to one account of him, "in his fourth year" 
 
 5 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 reading The Arabian Nights. Precocity aged three 
 deriving entertainment from the tales of Scheherazade 
 is a striking spectacle, but is one by no means so 
 impressive as Sapience aged "some eight" perusing 
 The Jesuifs Perspective. 
 
 It is pleasant to hear that some of the books taken in 
 hand by the boy Joshua had the attractive feature of 
 pictures. This was the case with Dryden's translation 
 of Plutarch's Lives, and with Jacob Cats's Book of 
 Emblems. It has been not quite untenably asserted 
 that the last-named book, "the book of Father Cats," 
 so dear to all Holland till late in the eighteenth 
 century, helped to mould Milton; still more tenably 
 may it be said that it helped to mould Reynolds. 
 
 Concerning his perusal of Richardson's Treatise, 
 Leslie suggests that the heart of the boy must have 
 burned within him when he read the passage in which 
 Richardson says that although he is no prophet or the 
 son of a prophet, he will venture to pronounce as 
 exceedingly probable that if ever the ancient, great, 
 and beautiful taste in painting revives it will be in 
 England. Certainly Joshua Reynolds did his best, if 
 not in practice, yet in preaching, to revive it. 
 
 In the Life and Times of Sir Joshua Reynolds by Leslie 
 and Taylor there is mention made of a memorandum 
 book belonging to the boy Joshua. "It is inscribed," 
 such is the account of it, "in a stiff but neat hand, 
 'Joshua Reynolds, ejus liber ex dono Pat$ri meius.'" 
 "Evidently," runs the comment on this, "his first 
 ' cast ' for a genitive for pater was pateri, and he. rests 
 
 6 
 
Varied Reading 
 
 content with patri. But the extracts show a varied and 
 very intelligently directed course of reading." The 
 boy who rested content with patri as the genitive 
 of pater would appear to have read Theophrastus, 
 Plutarch, Seneca, Marcus Antoninus, Pope, Shake- 
 speare, Milton, Dryden, the " Spectator " and 
 " Tatler," Cats's Book of Emblems, Afra Behn (irony 
 of juxtaposition ! ), Leonardo da Vinci, Du Fresnoy, 
 Richardson, Nelson ("pious" Robert), and the Bible. 
 It is not a bad list for a little boy. Moreover, there 
 exists, it seems, a "school Ovid, well thumbed in 
 parts," which belonged to the child Joshua. And yet 
 he could not CiQsXva& pater ! 
 
 Of his art-works produced in childhood there is not 
 much to be said. Only two productions call for mention, 
 his drawing of the colonnade under the a /. yi/- j. 
 grammar-school at Plympton — made on the f ^, •, , 
 back of a Latin exercise — and his painting i, d 
 
 of Parson Smart, of which a traditional 
 story has it that the canvas used for it — his first canvas 
 — was a bit of a boat-sail found on the Devon coast. 
 Parson Smart was tutor to Dick Edgcumbe, a boy-neigh- 
 bour and friend of Joshua Reynolds when his home was 
 a humble one near the great home of the Edgcumbes, 
 who to the last were his staunch friends. 
 
 With the lapse of years, Samuel Reynolds saw more 
 and more that his son Joshua had the makings of a 
 painter in him, and the idea, at one time cherished, 
 of making an apothecary of him, was abandoned. As 
 an eighteen-year-old youth he was sent to London, 
 
 7 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 where he was placed under the care of Mr. Hudson, 
 
 the most admired portrait-painter of the day, and pre- 
 
 eminently a painter of heads, which without 
 
 ^ ^ the aid of others he was, according to one 
 
 " °^' description of him, unable to place upon the 
 ^"^^^ shoulders. There is in the National Portrait 
 
 Gallery a painting by Hudson of the distinguished 
 Georgian lawyer. Sir John Willes. It is a large picture 
 of a waxen-faced gentleman with waxen hands. It can 
 hardly be a truthful presentment of the man who suc- 
 cessively occupied the position of Attorney-General, i 
 Chief Justice of the Common Pleas and Commissioner 
 of the Great Seal in England of the first half of the 
 eighteenth century, but it is right to say that in it 
 creditable painting is given to wig and robe, book, ink- 
 stand, and paper. It would be pleasant to be able to 
 record that the pious relations which existed at first 
 were maintained to the last between Hudson and 
 the younger painter; but a day came when Reynolds 
 had no good to say of Hudson, though even then he 
 classed him with better men than later scorners of his 
 work would class him with. " Kneller, Lely and?> 
 Hudson," said Reynolds in 1776 to Northcote, "will 
 not do now." 
 
 While with Hudson, young Joshua was largely oc- 
 cupied in making copies of the pictures of Guercino, 
 the Bolognese master. That he made much progress at 
 this time is not established, but as a 'prentice he knew 
 happy days, a red-letter one among them being the one 
 on which he secured a handshake from Pope, then 
 
 8 
 
Life-work Begun 
 
 and later a great favourite with him, especially in his 
 letters. 
 
 Hudson suddenly dismissed his pupil. He is sup- 
 posed, we are told, to have excited the jealousy of 
 his master by an admirable portrait of 
 an elderly female servant in the house, and ^^^^^^ > 
 having deferred to execute an order given '^ 
 
 him on the ground that the weather was wet and that 
 he waited for it to clear, this action was made the 
 pretext for his dismissal, couched in the words — 
 " You have not obeyed my orders, and shall not stay in 
 my house." 
 
 He forthwith returned to Devonshire, where we hear 
 of him "much employed in portraits." But he was 
 soon again in London, and' on good terms with 
 Hudson, who is thought to have introduced him to 
 the club that met at Old Slaughter's in St. Martin's ; 
 Lane, a club including the famous painter Hogarth 
 and the admired engravers Sullivan and McArdell. 
 As yet, however, he was to find London no abiding 
 city, for he was summoned back to Devonshire by the 
 illness of his father in 1746. Samuel Reynolds died 
 on Christmas Day of that year. 
 
 Reynolds now took a house at Plymouth Dock, and 
 began his life-work in good earnest. Not that his 
 style was yet formed, or that he imagined it to be 
 formed. He had seen the bad in Hudson, of London, 
 and he saw the good in Gandy, of Exeter. To the 
 healthful influence of this painter he willingly subjected 
 himself, and there are not wanting those who trace to 
 
 9 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 Gandy what is best in Reynolds's work of Plymouth 
 Dock days. 
 
 It may not be unprofitable here to pass in review 
 
 the chief pictures painted by Reynolds in his first 
 
 period, which may be said to have ended 
 
 . when, at twenty-six years of age, he went 
 
 Pictures ^^ jjjg j^|.g^ Continental tour. During his 
 sojourn in Devonshire in 1744, after his quarrel with 
 Hudson, he painted many pictures, in especial being 
 commissioned to paint the members of the Kendal 
 family, for his two pictures of one of whom he received 
 the sum of seven pounds. It was also at this period 
 of work at Plymouth Dock that Reynolds painted "the 
 greatest man of the place," the Commissioner of the 
 dockyard, Philip Vanbrugh. And the portrait of his 
 father, which Leslie saw in the Cottonian Library at Ply- 
 mouth, must have been painted before 1746. The young 
 artist had more success with it than he had — or had 
 had — with his picture of Lady Elizabeth Somers, which 
 one of his kindest critics describes as ' ' rather timidly 
 painted." 
 
 " Ip 1746," says Leslie, "he painted the portrait 
 of Captain Hamilton, father of the Marquis of Aber- 
 corn, which, it was said, was the first of his pictures 
 of this period which brought him into notice. When 
 later in life he again saw it he was surprised 
 to find it so well done, and, comparing it with his 
 subsequent works, lamented that in such a series of 
 years he should not have made a greater progress in 
 his art." Captain Hamilton was a gallant sailor, like 
 
 10 
 
h' ' 4 
 
 ;'■■'■■ ;::;;^ r;j«^^^W^ 
 
 
 Bjf^KE^' 
 
 
 ^w 
 
 H^^'^M 
 
 
 ^P" 
 
 ^^^^^^^H 
 
 1^^--^ 
 
 i-4li/ f/ j| 
 
 l^^tt 
 
 ^^^^^s 
 
 Age of Innocence (p. 176). 
 
Soldiers and Sailors 
 
 Keppel, and there was a special appropriateness in 
 Reynolds's achieving his first notable successes in the 
 portraits of sailors. Did he himself not hail from the 
 county which had given birth to Raleigh, Drake, 
 Hawkins, John Davis, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, and Sir 
 Richard Grenville? Among the sailors afterwards 
 painted by him were Anson and Rodney, and among 
 the soldiers Granby and Heathfield. The sailors have 
 kept their place in the nation's love, but Granby by 
 severe irony has retained chiefly a public-house sign 
 fame, and, though the hero of Gibraltar merits better, 
 his name of Heathfield is not one that to-day thrills 
 the hearts of young England as they are thrilled 
 by the names of Raleigh and Drake. 
 
 Many other soldiers of name and fame when Rey- 
 nolds painted them, have, with the lapse of years, lost 
 a main part of the distinction which once belonged to 
 them. This is the case with Colonel Tarleton and 
 Lord, Ligonier, concerning whom persons not complete 
 ignoramuses to-day ask : Who were they ? Not at 
 all in the same degree has this fate overtaken the 
 sailors painted by the painter who was first brought 
 into notice by his portrait of a sailor, and whose first 
 great picture was the picture of a sailor. 
 
 To Reynolds's Plymouth Dock period belongs also 
 the Eliot family picture. It represents Mr. Eliot with 
 his wife and children, and Capitain Hamilton, who 
 carries one of the children on his back. The captain 
 was to become the second husband of the mother of 
 those children, and was to meet his death through his 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 excessive love of her. The Eliot family picture was 
 the first larg^ figure-piece by Reynolds. Besides this 
 picture, he is stated to have painted about this time 
 portraits of Richard Eliot in a red waistcoat and his 
 wife Harriet in white satin. "Both are in the Hud- 
 sonian manner," says Tom Taylor, "and'so," he adds, 
 " is a portrait of Commodore Edgcumbe, also of this 
 date, which used to hang in the Corporation dining-, 
 room at Plympton." 
 
 Others named as sitters to Reynolds of this time are 
 Captdn (R.N.) and Mrs. Chaundy, Councillor Bury 
 and his wife, Alderman Facey, and Mrs. Field. The 
 portrait of the last-named is highly praised for the 
 delicacy and clearness of its carnations. A portrait of 
 the notorious Miss Chudleigh,^ afterwards Duchess of 
 Kingston, is also referred to this time, and to it are 
 referred Reynolds's early portraits of Mr. and Mrs, 
 Craunch, interesting from the fact that Mr. Craunch, 
 a Plympton gentleman, is believed to have been the 
 first to see a promising painter in the boy Joshua, who 
 was sent on his recommendation to Hudson. 
 
 Anecdote of course came to busy itself with Reynolds. 
 The oft-told hat-story here leads, and, so far as any 
 truth may underlie it, must have reference to Reynolds 
 of Plymouth Dock days. It was a custom of that time 
 for gentlemen to be painted hat in hand, and so in- 
 veterate had the custom of thus painting them become 
 
 ' An account of this lady's career, together with Sir Joshua's estimate 
 of her early beauty, will be found in Mr. Stephen Gwynn's Memorials 
 of an Eighteenth Century Painter. 
 
Formalism 
 
 with artists that young Reynolds, it is said, sent home 
 the picture of a gentleman who had desired to be 
 painted with his hat on his head with one there and 
 with another in his hand. 
 
 The story, if not true, is well invented. A certain 
 formalism long clung to Reynolds, and Austin Dobson 
 is not quite unjustified in writing in " A Gentleman of 
 the Old School"— 
 
 " Reynolds has painted him. A face 
 Filled with a fine old-fashioned grace, 
 Fresh-coloured, frank, with ne'er a trace 
 
 Of trouble shaded ; 
 The eyes are blue, the hair is drest 
 In plainest way, — one hand is prest 
 Deep in the flapped canary vest 
 
 With birds brocaded." 
 
 The hand thrust in the vest was part of the formalism 
 of Reynolds. Genius, however, will out, and young 
 Joshua was no mere formalist even in Plymouth Dock 
 days. In them he painted an interesting picture of 
 a boy reading by a reflected light, and in them he 
 painted a portrait of himself in which there is no ceding 
 to time-honoured conventions. 
 
 Mr. Algernon Graves estimates the number of 
 Reynolds's portraits of himself which must be now in 
 existence at "nearly a hundred." In early 
 days, when sitters made choice of their p / v 
 attitudes, and little or no freedom in the 
 matter of pose was allowed to Reynolds, he -^ ■' 
 
 was at a great advantage in having in himself a sitter 
 
 13 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 with whom he could experimentalise, and to this period 
 belongs a portrait representing him not in the con- 
 ventional Georgian manner as a gentleman dressed all in 
 his best with hand upon his heart. This picture — a 
 beautiful head — is thus described by one who saw it 
 when it hung in the dining-room of the painter's niece 
 with the latest picture painted by him of himself: " It 
 is masterly in handling, and powerful — almost Rem- 
 brandtesque — in chiaroscuro. The hair flows, without 
 powder, in long ringlets over the shoulders. The white 
 collar and ruffled front of the shirt are thrown open. 
 A dark cloak is flung over the shoulders. There is not 
 a trace of Hudson in the picture." The portrait by 
 Reynolds of himself, palette in hand, has been referred 
 to this early Devon period; but Leslie, leaning on 
 William Carpenter, who, he says, pointed out to him 
 the injured upper lip, taboos this idea, and assigns 
 1749 as the earliest date to the picture, that being 
 the year of the accident in Minorca which disfigured 
 Reynolds's mouth. A later portrait by Reynolds of 
 himself — the one painted on his being chosen a member 
 of the Academy of Florence — was to raise, we are told, 
 the reputation of English art in Florence. This is the 
 portrait which was presented by him to the Gallery of 
 Eminent Artists in that city, conformably with the rule 
 of its Academy, which demands the portrait of every 
 new member painted by his own hand. It was painted 
 in 1776, and sent with a handsomely worded letter in 
 Italian. Reynolds in it is represented in cap and gown 
 as D.C.L. of Oxford. His hair is pale brown with a 
 
 14 
 
Portraits of Himself 
 
 wave in it, and the cleft in his chin is well-marked. 
 His face is not a regular or handsome one, but is 
 sensible and pleasant. The portrait is beautifully 
 painted, the subject being manifestly treated with an 
 eye to effect. The colours are exquisitely mellow and 
 soft, the note of red given by the robe being carried 
 on throughout the picture, the touch of it on the cheek 
 being pronounced. The face gives the impression of 
 one that has not much changed since boyhood, other 
 than by the hardening of lines about the mouth, which 
 has a slightly contemptuous droop. The upper part 
 of the gown is a dark scarlet, and the lighter under 
 part the colour known as vieille rose. The painter 
 has shown wonderful skill in making these two anta- 
 gonistic reds blend. 
 
 Some other portraits by Reynolds of himself shall be 
 here called to mind. There is in the collection of Sir 
 Charles Tennant a portrait of him in his robes of 
 President of the Royal Academy. Another portrait 
 presents him under the aspect of his life-long homage 
 to Michael Angelo. It is the one sent to the Royal 
 Academy exhibition of 1780, being the portrait which 
 contains the bust of Michael Angelo. Above all, there 
 is the well-known portrait painted for Thrale, in which 
 Reynolds is represented in later life with his deafness 
 heavy upon him; hence the ear-trumpet in his hand. 
 
 A particular interest attaches to the pictures of Rey- 
 nolds in London in the National Gallery, the National 
 |.Portrait Gallery, and the Dulwich Gallery. Those in 
 the National Gallery represent him young, and as 
 
 IS 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 exceedingly uncomely, although in one case he is 
 tricked out very handsomely. The larger picture in 
 the National Portrait Gallery also represents him young. 
 In it he is facing forward and shading his eyes with 
 his hand. As a work of art this picture is exceedingly 
 interesting, unhandsome as is the pale, puffy youth who 
 is the subject of it. The smaller portrait in th6 National 
 Portrait Gallery is one marked by an astounding self- 
 flattery, unless all the other portraits of Reynolds — 
 alike those painted by himself and by his contemporaries 
 — be cruel misrepresentations of him, for in all of them 
 he has turbid eyes, an unsatisfactory mouth, and the 
 complexional unpleasantness which results from small- 
 pox, whereas in this picture his eyes are luminous, his 
 mouth is beautiful, and his complexion is brilliant. The 
 picture in the Dulwich Gallery presents him older, with 
 powdered hair. He wears a ruffled shirt and a grey- 
 green velvet coat, but there is no attempt to conceal 
 what time has done : he wears spectacles. Some see 
 humour in the expression of this Georgian English- 
 man ; but there is no humour other than good humour 
 in it. Of that there is abundance. 
 
 To return to the Reynolds of the picture with the 
 
 flowing, unpowdered ringlets, the young painter of Ply- 
 
 mouth Dock days. Leslie holds that during 
 
 "V his sojourn in Devonshire Reynolds did not 
 
 ■^ fail to study landscape, there so beautiful. 
 
 There is, he says, at Port Eliot a long narrow view 
 
 of Plymouth and the adjoining scenery from the hill 
 
 called Catdown, painted by him in 1748. 
 
 16 
 
His Native County 
 
 It will not be here out of place to consider Reynolds 
 in relation to his native county, where he spent his 
 entire youth and a main part of his young 
 manhood, and for which he retained an ^f"' 
 
 inextinguishable affection to the last. It is ■^^'^^»*««* 
 a county that well justifies the peculiar love and honour 
 in which it is held by its natives, so many of whom 
 have risen to distinction. Some of its sailors have 
 been named here; of its famous soldiers it will suffice 
 to instance Marlborough and Monk. Among its theo- 
 logians, so little were Parson Smart and Parson 
 Reynolds — good men both, but not men of large light — 
 representative, that it is here represented by Hooker 
 and Jewel, worthy natives of a county that, long 
 before it gave birth to them, had given birth to 
 St. Boniface. Of its poets two are named in John 
 Ford and Gay, one striking the saddest note struck 
 in Elizabethan days and the other making good his 
 patronymic in early Georgian days. Charles Kingsley 
 was not born or thought of in Reynolds's time, but 
 Coleridge was born and began to be thought of, and 
 Wolcot, the wit, had fame. Newcomen had invented 
 the steam-engine, and it only remained for the county 
 that had added illustrious names to England's history, 
 literature, and science, to add a name to art more 
 illustrious than Gandy's. 
 
 " It is satisfactory to think," says one of the bio- 
 graphers of Reynolds, in dealing with the period of 
 his youth, " that he studied with profit the works of 
 William Gandy of Exeter, a painter some of whose 
 
 17 C 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 portraits he certainly spoke of as equal to those of 
 Rembrandt. One of Candy's works he particularly 
 admired, the portrait of an alderman of Exeter, and 
 one of his observations he took much pleasure in 
 repeating — namely, that a picture should have a rich- 
 ness in its texture, as if the colours had been composed 
 of cream and cheese." The observation was charac- 
 teristically Devonian, and it is agreeable to hear of 
 it as quoted from Gandy of Exeter by Reynolds of 
 Plympton. 
 
 It was in his native county that Reynolds received 
 his first orders. It warms the heart to remember his 
 _. father's joy at his first commission from the 
 
 FtTSt ' • - 
 
 . " Commissioner." Captain George Edg- 
 cumbe, of the Devonshire family of that 
 name, was among the first persons to sit to 
 him on his settling in Devonshire after leaving Hudson. 
 At this time, too, he painted the portrait of the beau- 
 tiful Miss Eliot of Devonshire, whom as a painter of 
 name and fame he was to paint again years afterwards 
 in a portrait accounted one of his most beautiful. That 
 was when she had become Mrs. Bonfoy. Among his 
 pictures of other beautiful women of that good after- 
 time a high place is accorded to his portrait of Mrs. 
 Horneck, the Plymouth beauty and mother of Gold- 
 smith's "Jessamy Bride" and "Little Comedy." In 
 the pocket-books which contain the names of his sitters 
 there occur over and over again, it has been pointed 
 out, " good old western names, Buller and Edgcumbe, 
 Bastard and Parker." What has been termed "his 
 
 i8 
 
Reynolds in Devon 
 
 special Devonshire circle " included all these sitters 
 turned into friends, and it included the Molesworths 
 and the Mudges. One of the Mudges was to be painted 
 by him in a manner which more than all the learning of 
 the sitter assures him of remembrance. Reynolds's path 
 was ever crossing fatefuUy that of Devonshire men, as 
 when he found himself bound apprentice to Hudson of 
 Devonshire, or under the influence of Gandy of Devon- 
 shire, or sharing his house with Northcote of Devonshire, 
 or with his heart going out to Hayman of Devon- 
 shire. 
 
 It is known that when at the zenith of his fame in 
 London, having impaired his health by constant labour, 
 he went into Devonshire accompanied by Johnson. 
 "He was welcomed," so we are told, "with something 
 of a silent approbation ; for the populace of England 
 know little and care less about either painting or 
 poetry, or any such matters. The applause, too, of a 
 man's native place is generally the last which he 
 receives ; for those who knew him in youth will not 
 readily allow that in capacity he is superior to 
 themselves, and are apt to regard the coming of his 
 fame among them as an intrusion to be resented. But 
 Reynolds was a man armed in that philosophic 
 calmness which no disappointment could ruffle or 
 disturb. He received a kind welcome from the learned 
 and scientific Mudge, and was distinguished by the 
 notice of all men remarkable for knowledge or station. 
 And homage was paid to him by one then young and 
 nameless who has since risen high. ' Mr. Reynolds 
 
 19 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 was pointed out to me,' says Northcote, ' at a public 
 meeting, where a great crowd was assembled, I got 
 as near him as I could, from the pressure of the people, 
 to touch the skirt of his coat, which I did with a great 
 satisfaction to my mind.'" Thus was accorded to 
 Reynolds in his native county, if not by all, yet by 
 some, that enthusiastic homage which he in his day 
 had accorded to Pope. 
 
 It was on the occasion of this visit to Devonshire 
 with Reynolds that Dr. Johnson partook so liberally of 
 the famed " cream" as greatly to scandalise one of his 
 entertainers. It may be assumed that it took all the 
 Devonian in Reynolds to forgive the breach of manners 
 in the Doctor. 
 
 Some ten years later Reynolds again visited his 
 
 native county. He was at this time. (1773) President 
 
 oftheRoyal Academy, Knight, and honorary 
 
 J •' Doctor of Civil Law of Oxford. His native 
 
 ■^^^ place elected him mayor. Mayor of Plympton 
 — the title is one not calculated perhaps to dazzle every 
 reader of this, but Sir Joshua Reynolds had to pull 
 himself up for confiding to His Majesty George the 
 Third while walking with him at Hampton Court, that 
 the title of Mayor of Plympton gave him more pleasure 
 than any he had ever received, "excepting" — came 
 the belated apology — "excepting that which your 
 Majesty so graciously conferred on me — the honour of 
 knighthood." 
 
 " Dear knight of Plympton," so the painter is 
 apostrophised In affectionate lines addressed to him (in 
 
Racy of the Soil 
 
 the year of his becoming mayor of his native place) by 
 Dr. Barnard, Dean of Derry. 
 
 Why was his pleasure so great at being elected 
 mayor of Plympton? The reason is not far to seek. 
 " Every man," wrote Johnson (and he wrote this to 
 Reynolds), "has a lurking wish to appear considerable 
 in his native place." 
 
 One likes to think of Reynolds as speaking with his 
 county's speech, and is well pleased to find him avowedly 
 introducing a Devonshire idiom into a description of a 
 Bolognese picture seen during his stay at Bologna in 
 1752. It is, according to him, the picture of a young 
 woman representing human life, and having " in her 
 right hand a flower, and what we call in Devon tell-a 
 clocks." 
 
 He was, then, racy of Devon soil, and even when his 
 only visible connection with his native county was his 
 connection with the Devonshire Club, his heart remained 
 in unchangeable touch with it. 
 
 21 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 
 FOREIGN TRAVEL. 
 [1749-52.] 
 
 In the spring of 1749 Reynolds met Keppel at the 
 house of Lord Edgcumbe in his native county. The 
 
 sailor, already a man of mark, though only 
 ee ng four-and-twenty years of age, was entrusted 
 
 with a Government mission to the states of 
 ^PP^ ' Barbary, and, with the rank of Commodore, 
 '^^ was appointed to the command in the Medi- 
 
 terranean. The painter was but two years his senior, 
 and a friendly intimacy resulted in the Commodore's 
 offering him a passage out. It was joyfully accepted, 
 and the young painter set out on a journey with Keppel 
 which took him to Rome, vi& Lisbon, Cadiz, Gibraltar, 
 and Algiers. 
 
 Having seen somewhat of all these places, Reynolds 
 came to see more of Minorca, where he made a sojourn 
 
 at first very pleasant, by reason of the kind- 
 Minorca ness of Governor Blakeney, who was painted 
 
 by him. It was also at first very profitable, 
 for the Governor was not the only person who gave him 
 a sitting, but his fellow-travellers, though, it seems, 
 
Accident in Minorca 
 
 they did not think much of the young artist, allowed 
 him to paint them, and he found it to his advantage to 
 do so. He was, however, to make a sad experience in 
 Minorca, being thrown from his horse and receiving a 
 wound to his mouth which necessitated the cutting 
 away of a portion of his lip, to his permanent disfigure- 
 ment and — some have held — to the permanent detriment 
 of his utterance. 
 
 On leaving Minorca he proceeded to Leghorn, and in 
 due course arrived at Rome, where he remained two 
 years, making studies and copies of pictures, but 
 not, it seems, of those of Michael Angelo. „ 
 
 Part of the time in Rome was spent in living ' 
 
 down his disappointment upon first visiting '■^ 
 
 the Vatican, where he was severely punished for his 
 tardiness in recognising the beauty of Raphael's work, 
 his repeated and prolonged visits to the Vatican result- 
 ing in a cold which induced life-long deafness. So far 
 his path had been one of roses not devoid of thorns, but 
 no complaint was brought to book by him. Instead, 
 there are picture-notes, most of them (but not all of 
 them) of a strictly impersonal character. Among the 
 Roman notes are these: "My own picture," "A foot, 
 from my own," and there is entry made of " Caricaturas 
 which I did at Rome." 
 
 In 1752 he left Rome for Florence, where he spent 
 two months, and where his notes show, it 
 is stated, that he examined the pictures ' 
 
 in the Pitti Gallery, making, however, '•* 
 
 merely the mention of certain masterpieces. As his wont 
 
 23 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 was, he went the round of the churches, in that of San 
 Marco noticing two altarpieces by Fra Bartolommeo, 
 but making no mention of the works of Fra Angelico. 
 This is made matter of comment by Tom Taylor, who 
 adds that he finds "not a word of the 'Paradise' of 
 Orcagna, or the frescoes of Ghirlandajo." At Florence 
 he painted a portrait of the sculptor Wilton, which was 
 much admired. 
 
 Next he visited Bologna, the city of Guercino, the 
 master whom, it will be remembered, he had been set to 
 j3 J copy by Hudson, whose instructions he had 
 
 so bettered as to produce replicas of the 
 Italian's pictures which it has since beenfound 
 difficult to distinguish from the originals. The Bolognese 
 notes, though severely curt and incomqiunicative, like all 
 the other picture-notes of Reynolds of this time, have a 
 particular interest. " St. Cecilia, the best of Raffaele," is 
 noted in " St. Giovanni in Monte." Many Ludovicos 
 are noted. " 'Tis turned intoUerably (sic) black," is the 
 comment upon one^a comment which was to be passed 
 by others in after-days upon many a picture of Reynolds's 
 own. Of another picture by Ludovico the note runs: 
 " Great spirit, and admirably drawn (hands and feet) 
 and coloured: this is one of the best pictures I have 
 seen of him in Bologna: they say Guercino took his 
 manner from this picture ; 'tis certainly much like 
 Guercino's manner, but superior." Yet he sees what 
 is excellent in Guerciiio; witness notes such as these: 
 " The Assumption, a capital picture by Guercino ; the 
 Virgin is sitting on the clouds, and not flying upwards." 
 
 24 
 
Boy Reading (p. 13)- 
 
Reynolds's Sisters 
 
 (The closing comment is characteristic of Reynolds, 
 himself to be unequalled in presenting figures other than 
 those flying upwards.) "St. William (Guglielmo) by 
 Guercino: his very best stile." " St. Francis, an angel 
 playing on musick in the air : Guercino. His best 
 stile." There are many eulogistic notes on pictures by 
 L. Caracci, whose influence has been much observed 
 in the early work of Guercino ; and there are notes on 
 Guido Reni, whose style Guercino more approached in 
 his later days. One of these notes runs, " There is a 
 certain softness in Guido that is wonderfully pleasing;" 
 and in the same note there is ascribed to Guido "the 
 genteelest pencilling I ever saw." The character- 
 istically Georgian phrasing employed throughout the 
 notes would jog the interest did it call for jogging, as 
 when a pictured St. Joseph is described as " shaving," 
 the meaning being that he was using a plane. 
 
 From Bologna Reynolds went to Modena, and next 
 visited Parma, Mantua, Ferrara, and Venice, where he 
 made a stay, giving careful study to, and 
 writing detailed notes on, the pictures there. ome- 
 
 In 1752 he returned to England vi& Paris, wa^-zw 
 
 where he stayed a month, and where, it is set on 
 record, he painted a beautiful picture of a beautiful 
 woman, Mrs. Chambers, the wife of the architect of 
 Somerset House, afterwards knighted. 
 
 It is due to the memory of Reynolds's , 
 
 sisters, Mary and Elizabeth, to point out ^^y^of^^ 
 that they advanced him money for his first " ^'^ 
 
 Continental tour. Mary had before paid half bis premium 
 
 25 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 as apprentice to Hudson. Reynolds was not ungrateful, 
 as the daughter and daughter's daughter of this Mary 
 were to find. 
 
 As regards the benefit derived by him from his foreign 
 travel, he had doubtless gained in knowledge of art and 
 
 of the world, but all had not gone well with 
 . him. His beauty was irreparably marred; 
 
 some held, as already stated, that his speech 
 was deplorably affected, and he was deaf for life. He 
 had, however, made the " Grand Tour," and such sun- 
 shine of the breast was his that this was the view of his 
 case that he himself took. When it is allowed that an 
 invincible cheerfulness is heroism, Joshua Reynolds, 
 who, under the aspect of his inirritability, was years 
 afterwards to be called by Dr. Johnson " the most in- 
 vulnerable of men," will take his place with the world's 
 heroes. 
 
 26 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 HIS FIRST "great" PICTURE: ADMIRAL KEPPEL, 17S3. 
 [1752-55-] 
 
 The "Grand Tour" having played havoc with his 
 health, Reynolds determined to make a stay in Devon- 
 shire before taking- up his residence in London, and a 
 three months' sojourn in his native county was the 
 result of this resolution. Even during this brief period 
 he did not eat idle bread, witness his portrait of Dr. 
 John Mudge, the learned physician, painted at this time. 
 On his return to London he took a lodging in St. 
 Martin's Lane, near a drawing academy, which was 
 
 the first after Sir James Thornhill's. Of it . r j • 
 , , , r „ , • , -^ Lodging 
 
 he became a member, fellow-members with . ^, 
 
 him being, among others, Nollekens the ^ .. ," 
 
 sculptor and McArdell the engraver. His , 
 
 sister Frances undertook to housekeep for ' 
 
 him. A clever, ambitious, distressful woman, she was 
 
 not a notable housewife; and with the lapse of years 
 
 the relations between her and her brother ir- ■ . 
 
 His sister 
 grew more and more strained, howbeit they p, 
 
 held by one another in a manner which 
 
 only those will understand who know that the family tie, 
 
 even when it had become a black knot, was in Georgian 
 
 27 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 days by all, as it is still by many, regarded as a thing 
 
 that must not be snapped. 
 
 The first picture painted by Reynolds on his return to 
 
 London was a portrait of Marchi, the young Italian 
 
 brought by him to England. This portrait it is which 
 
 elicited the dolorous cry from Hudson: "Reynolds, 
 
 you do not paint as well as you did before you went to 
 
 Italy ! " How much better Reynolds painted Hudson 
 
 had not the eyes to see, in this respect unlike other people 
 
 who plied the young painter with orders for portraits. 
 
 Two of these discriminating people are named in Lord 
 
 Godolphin and Lady Anna Dawson. Of Lady Anna, 
 
 Reynolds painted what would seem to have been his 
 
 first "fancy" portrait, being one of this Georgian lady 
 
 as Diana. 
 
 These two pictures were, it may safely be assumed, 
 
 painted in St. Martin's Lane, where orders multiplied at 
 
 such a rate that before the expiration of the 
 
 year which had brought him to London, 
 
 Reynolds was able to take a house in Great 
 
 CA. t Newport Street, and to raise his prices. 
 
 ' His industry was enormous, and his good 
 
 753 friend, Lord Edgcumbe, procured much 
 
 work for him. To this year (1753) belong portraits of 
 
 „. , . the old Dukes of Devonshire and Grafton, 
 
 Pzdu'ys of " ■ i» 
 
 . •' and to it belongs the famous picture of 
 
 j^ . J Admiral Keppel by the seashore, the first 
 ■^" ' of many pictures of that hero painted by 
 '"'"^ him. By it Reynolds so raised his repu- 
 
 tation as to win for himself a place in the van of all 
 
 28 
 
Pilfering 
 
 the native painters of his time; and a tenth-rate 
 foreigner, Liotard, who by a ludicrous incongruity 
 shared public favour with him, was soon demolished. 
 All the world knows of the paean of praise called forth 
 by the Keppel picture; " and yet," writes Leslie, whose 
 voice swells that paean, "in this admirable portrait 
 which cost Reynolds so much pains, the attitude is 
 taken from that of a statue." 
 
 "Reynolds condemned" — so Leslie points out justly 
 — " other painters for pilfering ' one figure from one 
 print, and another from another,' but no 
 artist more often adopted hints from previous Pilfering 
 art." Further, he draws attention to the 
 fact that Reynolds not only excused but recommended 
 the practice of taking hints. " 'A readiness,' said he, 
 'in taking such hints, which escape the dull and 
 ignorant, makes, in my opinion, no inconsiderable part 
 of that faculty of the mind which is called genius.'" All 
 this is true, and it is also true that Reynolds from the 
 Academy pulpit said, in reference to a method of taking 
 hints recommended by him : " Borrowing and stealing 
 with such art and caution will have the right to the 
 same lenity as was used by the Lacedaemonians, who 
 did not punish theft, but the want of artifice to conceal." 
 Small blame is his who, reading that, attaches a grim 
 significance to the fact that the man who spoke thus 
 painted a picture called "The Blackguard Mercury." 
 Mercurial himself from first to last, Reynolds had other 
 qualities so striking, and they were so strikingly mani- 
 fested in his portrait of Keppel, that it comprehensibly 
 
 29 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 raised him to a dizzying height in the estimation of the 
 public. 
 
 Orders poured in. Noblemen young and old sat 
 to the painter of Keppel, among the young, Lord 
 Huntingdon and Lord Stormont, breezily described by 
 Walpole as "new young lords, fresh and fresh." They 
 elected to be painted whole-length on one canvas, and 
 the painter is praised for setting them well on their legs. 
 His success with them won Lord Holderness, at this 
 time Home Secretary, to sit to Reynolds. This noble- 
 man was advanced in years, and a friendly eye, which 
 saw in his lordship's person one " which at all times 
 bespoke a fashioned gentleman," perceived also that 
 his complexion was "much heightened by scorbutic 
 eruption." 
 
 This eye, as will be seen, belonged to Mason, 
 
 a poor poet and a poorer painter, but an intelligent 
 
 ,, observer; witness his Observations on Sir 
 
 Mason on 
 
 P J, Joshua Reynolds' s Method of Colouring. What 
 
 follows is his description of the method by 
 which Sir Joshua's picture of Lord Holderness was pro- 
 duced: — " On his light-coloured canvas he had already 
 laid a ground of white, where he meant to place the 
 head, and which was still wet. He had nothing upon 
 his palette but flake-white, lake, and black; and, with- 
 out making any previous sketch or outline, he began 
 with much celerity to scumble these pigments together, 
 till he had produced, in less than an hour, a likeness 
 sufficiently intelligible, yet withal, as might be expected, 
 cold and pallid to the last degree. At the second sitting he 
 
 30 
 
Picture Cracking 
 
 added, I believe, to the three other colours a little Naples 
 yellow; but I do not remember that he used any vermilion, 
 neither then nor at the third trial; but it is to be noted 
 that his Lordship had a countenance much heightened 
 by scorbutic eruption. Lake alone might produce the car- 
 nation required; However this be, the portrait turned 
 out a striking likeness, and the attitude, so far as a 
 three-quarters canvas could admit, perfectly natural and 
 peculiar to his person, which at all times bespoke a 
 fashioned gentleman. His drapery was crimson velvet, 
 copied from a coat he then wore, and apparently not 
 only painted but glazed with lake, which has stood to 
 this hour perfectly well, though the face, which, as well 
 as the whole picture, was highly varnished before he 
 sent it home, very soon faded, and soon after the fore- 
 head particularly cracked, almost to peeling oif, which 
 it would have done long since had not his pupil Doughty 
 repaired it." 
 
 This is perhaps the best place in which to deal with 
 the charge so frequently brought against Reynolds that 
 he wittingly used unstable colours. In that 
 matter it should be remembered that the ^*^«*'^ 
 painter upon whose method of colouring at ° °^^^ 
 
 an early period in his career Mason made the fore- 
 going observations, was to the last what he sternly 
 forbade his students to be, an experimentalist with 
 gallipots, and, in the absence of all certain knowledge 
 to the contrary, it is not only kindly but reasonable to 
 assume that he was trying to compound that mixture 
 which would combine brilliance with durability, and 
 
 31 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 that in so far as he wittingly used unstable colours he 
 used the only medium which would produce the effect 
 that gave its particular character to his work, in which 
 lords and ladies gay, by a refinement of irony, were 
 represented with a beauty not only as bright but as 
 perishable as their own.^ The case of the Marquis of 
 Drogheda, whose portrait has been instanced as one 
 the fading of which maintained a curious parallelism 
 between the counterfeit and real man, was doubtless 
 one of many similar cases. The Marquis, according to 
 J. T. Smith, the author of the Life of Nollekens, was 
 painted in early life by Sir Joshua Reynolds. He 
 shortly afterwards went abroad and remained away 
 between twenty and thirty years, during which time 
 he ran into excess, became bilious, and returned to 
 Ireland with a shattered constitution, to find that the 
 portrait and the original had faded together. 
 
 It must be hoped that the Marquis was edified by the 
 parallelism, but it is not on record that he was, any 
 more than it is on record that the other fine-gentleman 
 and fine-lady sitters to Reynolds endorsed the opinion 
 of Opie, of whom it is stated that he used to say that 
 the faded pictures of Reynolds were finer than those of 
 
 ' Regarding the method of colouring recommended by Reynolds, 
 the following is one of his most characteristic recipes : — " In respect to 
 painting the flesh tint, after it has been finished with very strong 
 colours, such as ultramarine and carmine, pass white over it very very 
 thin with oil. I believe it will have a wonderful effect. Make a 
 finished sketch of every portrait you intend to paint, and by the help of 
 that dispose ybur living model; then finish at the first time on a ground 
 made of Indian red and black." 
 
 32 
 
Mrs. Chambers (p. 25). 
 
Ghosts of Pictures 
 
 most other painters in a perfect condition. James 
 Northcote, years afterwards, in words of especial 
 felicity, said of Reynolds's paintings " the very ghosts 
 of them remain fine." Reynolds himself supplied the 
 best possible excuse for his use of such colours as lake 
 and carmine instead of vermilion, recommended to him 
 as less fleeting than they, when he said that he could see 
 no vermilion in flesh. It was to ask much of him to 
 ask of him to paint — as enduring — a flesh-colour which 
 he could not see. 
 
 That in his determination to paint the colours that he 
 could see, Reynolds had sometimes recourse to mixtures 
 strongly to be discommended seems undeni- 
 able, but too much importance must not be . 
 
 attached to the counsel said to have been , 
 given by him to a nobleman who painted for -' 
 his pleasure : " Mix a little wax with your colours, 
 but don't tell anybody," or to his remark on another 
 occasion made, it is said, to the same amateur: "All 
 good pictures crack." 
 
 While it is far from being proven that Reynolds 
 failed in taking steps to secure durability for his colours, 
 it might profitably be shown that it was in 
 his search after the stable in colour that he '^f ^ " 
 was guilty of the singular crime of cruelty i^^ctures 
 to pictures. The history of artistic malpractices con- 
 tains no more remarkable chapter than that which 
 regards his mutilation of old masterpieces of painting 
 with a view to discovering the manner of the laying on 
 of the colour in them. The plea that a man may do 
 
 33 D 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 what he will with his own has been raised on his behalf, 
 but barter could scarcely so make a picture by Titian 
 Joshua Reynolds's own, that there was justification for 
 his defacing it. The truth regarding him would appear 
 to be that, so far from being indifferent to the stable in 
 colouring, his vehement desire for it carried him to the 
 most culpable lengths. His knowledge of the classics 
 was little, or he might have taken a leaf out of the life- 
 book of that Roman poet whose reverence for the 
 pictures and statues collected by him caused him to 
 worship them. How must the havoc of pictures made 
 by Joshua Reynolds have grieved the shade of Silius 1 
 
 To return to the picture of Lord Holderness, the 
 fugitive face of which called for comment here made at 
 some length on Reynolds's mode of painting, it would 
 not be fair to take it as representative of the painter in 
 1754, in which year he painted Mrs. Bonfoy of Devon- 
 shire, giving to her lovely face a more abiding por- 
 traiture than that which he accorded to the scorbutic 
 face of the statesman. 
 
 As for the sitters of 1755, the recorded names of 
 whom number over a hundred, only a few of them need 
 y,T be here glanced at. They included the 
 
 Sitters sailors Anson, of round-the-world fame, and 
 gf rtjee Boscawen, with his sailors' nickname for 
 ^ '^^ him, " Old Dreadnought" ; and the soldiers 
 Ligonier, at that time Commander-in-Chief, and Haldane, 
 a few years later to win high distinction for himself in 
 the West Indies. They included Hillsborough, in 1755 
 made Treasurer of the Chambers (he was afterwards 
 
 34 
 
Anson and Boscawen 
 
 Secretary of State under Lord North), and Townshend, 
 described by Tom Taylor as " the wit and statesman, to 
 whom we owe the resolutions that lost us America." 
 Lord Harcourt, too, sat to Reynolds in 1755. He was 
 governor to the Prince of Wales, afterwards George the 
 Third, some of his precepts to whom were, it is recorded, 
 " Sir, pray hold up your head ! Sir, for God's sake 
 turn out your toes." 
 
 A fine copy of Reynolds's picture of Anson hangs 
 to-day in the National Portrait Gallery in London. The 
 man of "round the world" fame as here presented is 
 a pink-and-white faced, smug-looking person in a very 
 handsome naval uniform, white and blue with much 
 gilt binding. The picture is a half-length, with face 
 three-quarters to the left. A strong foil to it is supplied 
 by a picture of Boscawen, which hangs near to it. 
 The sailor who dreaded nothing is an austere-faced 
 man with a thin slit mouth, aquiline nose, and grey 
 eyes of an icy coldness. He is portrayed to the waist 
 in a fine uniform, which is carefully painted. The side- 
 way lean of his head adds individuality to his portrait. 
 
 Demagogues took their' turn among the sitters of 
 Reynolds at this early period of his career, as later. 
 Alderman Beckford and Dr. Lucas sat to him in 1755, 
 and from this year dates his portrait of Mrs. Wilkes, 
 the wife of the demagogue. Reynolds preserved, para- 
 doxically enough, a long friendship with John Wilkes, 
 and one cannot help deploring that he never painted the 
 man he knew and evidently liked so well. 
 
 A time was to come when all the men great in letters 
 
 35 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 in England were to sit to Reynolds. In 1755 the men 
 of letters among' his sitters were Archibald Bower, a 
 Scotsman of a noted controversial career, and Dr. 
 Armstrong, also a Scotsman, the author of an admired 
 poem on the Art of Preserving Health. Famous beauties 
 who sat to Reynolds in that year were the Ladies 
 Caroline and Elizabeth Keppel, sisters of the sailor. 
 Lady Kildare, Mrs. Bastard, and Mrs. Molesworth. 
 Among his sitters in 1755 was also the Lady Juliana 
 Penn, whose children he afterwards painted in the 
 famous Penn family picture. 
 
 Ladies in that year, as in later years, by much out- 
 numbered the men among his sitters, and in the painting 
 ^ of them he is already seen "idealising" in 
 
 . . „ the deplorable Georgian reading of that 
 ^ word. A Miss Wynyard is painted as a 
 
 sibyl wearing a turban and holding an inscribed scroll. 
 It is not always realised how difficult was the task 
 which was set to Reynolds as the painter of fashionable 
 England of his time. "We must represent to our- 
 selves," says Thackeray in his paper on George the 
 Third in The Four Georges, "all fashionable female 
 Europe, at that time, as plastered with white and 
 raddled with red." Let any one further represent to 
 himself the prevailing female head-dress and costume 
 of the eighteenth century, and he cannot fail to give the 
 admiration due to the painter of such grace and sim- 
 plicity as Reynolds has contrived to portray in the 
 person of Mrs. Molesworth, and of many another lady 
 of fashion her contemporary. 
 
 36 
 
Ladies as Goddesses 
 
 A certain sameness in Reynolds's pictures of women 
 as contrasted with his pictures of men must be granted. 
 It is not, however, matter for legitimate 
 wonder when it is remembered that whereas 
 his portraits of women present almost um- ' , 
 
 formly society beauties, those of men present ^ . 
 — besides society beauties, or macaronis in 
 the naming of their time — soldiers, sailors, ■' 
 poets, historians, men of every branch of letters, 
 lawyers, statesmen, artists, and scientists. One cannot 
 doubt that it was a commendable misliking of the thing 
 real resulting from the Georgian life and dress in cases 
 other than those modified by exceptional circumstances 
 that caused painters like Reynolds to have recourse to 
 what they deemed the ideal. It was not given to every 
 man of that time, as it was to Goldsmith, to see the 
 ludicrousness of the conception of the ideal which found 
 embodiment in Georgian ladies presented as goddesses, 
 and even when the author of The Vtcar of Wakefield 
 had set all England laughing at Mrs. Primrose painted 
 as Venus, all England accorded its admiration to 
 Reynolds's picture of the Duchess of Manchester with 
 her son as " Diana disarming Cupid," though why a 
 matron and a mother should be presented as the maiden 
 goddess must have been then, as it is still, an insoluble 
 riddle to those not minded to rest content with seeing 
 in the picture of the Duchess as Diana an attempt on 
 the part of the painter to get away from the Georgian 
 even unto the Greek. 
 
 A tale is told in the fact that it was primarily 
 
 37 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 with women that Reynolds mythologised, witness his 
 "Lady Sarah Bunbury sacrificing to the Graces," 
 "Lady Blake as Juno receiving the Cestus from 
 Venus," and a score of pictures similar ; and it is 
 not a tale which shows him at his best with women ; 
 yet the fewest persons are to this day in agreement 
 with Horace Walpole, who, paying a fine compliment 
 to the women of his time and depreciating under one 
 aspect of him the most admired painter of them, said, 
 " Mr. Reynolds seldom succeeds in women." 
 
 However opinions on this subject may differ, all are 
 
 agreed that Reynolds achieved his first signal success in 
 
 , the portrait of a man, and that his portraits 
 
 ^3"*" * of tiiJs man, as young and old, have an 
 ^ " inestimable value. The portrait of young 
 
 J^. •' Keppel painted in 1753 has been already 
 
 touched on here ; of the portraits of him 
 grown older two should be well known to Londoners, 
 One hangs in the National Portrait Gallery, and gives a 
 very favourable presentment of the sailor who did not 
 fight hard enough to please his countrymen, wherefore 
 they had him court-martialled. He has a firm grip on 
 his sword, is dressed in an elegant r^aval uniform, and 
 there is a pleasing colour in his face, which is marked 
 by considerable jowl. Reynolds, it is plain, took great 
 pains with his subject, and the picture is beautifully 
 finished and of a delicious tone. The other portrait of 
 Keppel hangs in the National Gallery. It, too, is 
 splendid in colour, though the subject of it is by no 
 means so sprucely attired as in the picture in the 
 
 38 
 
Keppel 
 
 Portrait Gallery, which was painted for John Dunning, 
 the able and eloquent lawyer who helped to secure the 
 acquittal of Keppel. In both pictures the Admiral 
 appears as a sad-eyed man, and in that in the National 
 Gallery there is a heavy sea behind him and a dark 
 sky over him. No man knew better than the painter 
 of that picture how heart-stricken had been the brave 
 sailor accused of cowardice. 
 
 39 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 
 FIRST PORTRAIT OF JOHNSON, AND OTHER PICTURES OF 
 THE LATER 'FIFTIES. 
 
 Tom Taylor admirably depicts the salient features of 
 the London world of letters when Reynolds appeared 
 on the scene in 1753. 
 
 " Burke was at the Middle Temple, nominally read- 
 ing for the Bar, but already contributing to the news- 
 
 papers and periodicals of the day, and 
 . ^ casting about for settled employment; at 
 
 one time meditating emigration, at another 
 entering the lists for a consulship at Madrid. Gold- 
 smith, in disgrace at home, was leaving his uncle 
 Contarini's, to study medicine at Edinburgh. Johnson 
 was drowning his grief for the death of his wife in 
 hard labour on his Dictionary, and putting the finishing 
 touch to the Rambler, of which the last paper appeared 
 in the March of this year. Richardson was on the 
 pinnacle of his fame : Clarissa Harlowe had been 
 finished for two years, and Sir Charles Grandison was 
 on the eve of publication. Fielding had produced his 
 Amelia the year before, and was now beginning to 
 sink under the complication of ailments which carried 
 him off in 1754. Smollett was resting his pen after 
 the publication of Peregrine Pickle, and trying, without 
 
 40 
 
Admiral Keppel (p. 28). 
 
Pictures of Writers 
 
 success, the experiment of a return to practice. Gray 
 was enjoying- the reputation of the Elegy, published 
 in 1749, and on the point of breaking into what 
 Walpole called his ' tfcree years of flower.' " 
 
 Walpole and the three first-named of the men in 
 the foregoing — Burke, Goldsmith, and Johnson — were 
 to be transmitted to posterity in their habits as they 
 lived by Reynolds, and though the same thing does 
 not hold good of the other men named, it is worth 
 remembering that Reynolds was to paint a young 
 girl reading the novel which had set Richardson on 
 the pinnacle of his fame, and he was to paint the 
 author of Tristram Shandy. Among dramatists to be 
 painted by him, besides Goldsmith, were Colman 
 and Sheridan; and among poets, besides Goldsmith, 
 Beattie, Mason, and Macpherson. Hoole, the trans- 
 lator of Tasso, was to live in his portrait, and through 
 him the faces of the Warton brothers, poets and critics, 
 and that of the critic Malone, were to be assured of 
 remembrance. Thanks to him, the features outward 
 and visible of Gibbon, Robertson, and Adam Fergusson, 
 the historians, were not to be lost to the world, and 
 among other men of letters who were to live in coun- 
 terfeit through him were to be Dr. Burney, Dr. 
 Hawkesworth, Bishop Percy, and James Boswell. 
 
 It was appropriate enough that Johnson 
 should be the first in this long series of Johnson 
 writers to be painted by Reynolds. The "'^ 
 
 beginning of the life-long friendship which ^^^"' 
 came to exist between the great Cham of literature 
 
 41 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 and the great Cham of art of that day is thus described 
 by Allan Cunningham, leaning on Boswell : — 
 
 " Some time in the year 1754 Reynolds acquired the 
 acquaintance, and afterwards the friendship, of Samuel 
 Johnson. How this happened is related by Boswell.^ 
 The artist was visiting in Devonshire, and in an interval 
 of conversation or study opened the Life of Savaget 
 While he was standing with his arm leaning against 
 the chimney-piece, he began to read, and it seized his 
 attention so strongly that, not being able to lay down 
 the book till he had finished it, when he attempted to 
 move he found his arm totally benumbed. He was 
 solicitous to know an author one of whose books had 
 thus enchanted him, and by accident or design he met 
 him at the Miss Cotterels' in Newport Street. It was 
 Reynolds's good fortune also to make a remark which 
 Johnson perceived could only have arisen in the mind 
 of a man who thought for himself. The ladies were 
 regretting the death of a friend to whom they owed 
 great obligations. ' You have, however, the comfort,' 
 said Reynolds, ' of being relieved from the burden of 
 gratitude.' They were shocked at this selfish sugges- 
 tion; but Johnson maintained that it was true to human 
 nature, and, on going away, accompanied Reynolds 
 home. Thus commenced a friendship which was con- 
 tinued to old age without interruption." 
 
 " The friendship grew apace, and not only did Johnson 
 become devoted to Reynolds, but he formed a hearty 
 liking for his sister, the " Renny dear" of the verses 
 in which he parodies the Percy Ballads as fojlows : — 
 
 42 
 
Frances Reynolds 
 
 " I therefore pray thee, Renny dear, 
 That thou wilt give to me, 
 With cream and sugar softened well, 
 Another dish of tea. 
 
 Nor fear that I, my gentle maid. 
 
 Shall long detain the cup, 
 When once unto the bottom I 
 
 Have drunk the liquor up. 
 
 Yet hear, alas ! this mournful truth, 
 
 Nor hear it with a frown. 
 Thou canst not make the tea so fast 
 
 As I can gulp it down." 
 
 An Essay on Taste, written by Frances Reynolds, was 
 highly extolled by Dr. Johnson, and it is conceivable 
 that the sad woman who wrote in her commonplace 
 book, "The first step to be despised is to be pitied," 
 was better understood by the brooding stranger than 
 by her kinsman, in whose mental life brooding had no 
 part. Certain it is that while Reynolds visited on his 
 sister that resentment which Great Claus in a family 
 largely visit upon Little Claus, in especial being irked 
 by the aspirations of that lesser one, Johnson derived 
 equal pleasure from the successes of both brother and 
 sister, and writes jubilantly under date January gth, 
 '759i to a friend: — "Reynolds has within these few 
 days raised his price to twenty guineas a head, and 
 Miss is much employed in miniaturas." 
 
 As the intimate of Reynolds " and Miss," Johnson in 
 the course of time is seen to be almost as much at home 
 
 43 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 in the world of art as in the world of letters. " The 
 artists," he writes to Baretti, "have established a 
 yearly exhibition of pictures and statues, in imitation, 
 I am told, of foreign academies. This year was the 
 second exhibition. They please themselves much with 
 the multitude of spectators, and imagine that the 
 I English school will rise much in reputation, " There is 
 a covert jeer in that, and there is an open one in what 
 follows: — "Surely life, if it be not long, is tedious; 
 since we are forced to call in the assistance of so many 
 trifles to rid us of our time — of that time which never 
 can return." After this moralising it causes a shock of 
 amusement to find Dr. Johnson penning an introduc- 
 tion to the catalogue of the new exhibition, and treating 
 it as no trifling matter at all. " The purpose of this 
 exhibition," he writes, " is not to enrich the artist, 
 but to advance the art; the eminent are not flattered 
 with preference, nor the obscure insulted with contempt; 
 whoever hopes to deserve public favour, is here invited 
 to display his merit." 
 
 At this time the Vicar of Wakefield was not yet 
 written, but the word "fudge" was already current in 
 England. 
 
 When in the year 1762 Reynolds took an autumn 
 holiday in Devon, Johnson, as has already been pointed 
 A Holidav ""*' ^^^ ^^^ companion. To Mary Palmer, 
 ^^.^^ Reynolds's sister, belongs the credit of 
 
 Tohnson having on that occasion afforded the Doctor 
 a novel and delightful experience. Happen- 
 ing to ask him if he liked pancakes, she received the 
 
 44 
 
Johnson 
 
 reply that he did, but that he had never had enough of 
 them. She thereupon had pancakes served to a number 
 which allowed Dr. Johnson to have thirteen. Clever as 
 generous and kind, Mary Palmer was the author of the 
 famous Devonshire Dialogue, which has been pronounced 
 to be the best piece of literature in the vernacular of 
 Devon. 
 
 In the year 1764 Hogarth died, and Reynolds 
 narrowly escaped death, being attacked by a sudden 
 serious illness. Johnson, in congratulating him on his 
 recovery, writes: " If I should lose you, I should lose 
 almost the only man whom I can call a friend." The 
 goodwill was mutual, and a very striking instance of 
 the trust reposed by Reynolds in Johnson is on record. 
 Being invited to become first President of the Royal 
 Academy in 1768, he declined the honour until he had 
 discussed the matter with Johnson, who favoured the 
 idea, and who subsequently broke a long- abstinence 
 from wine by drinking it in celebration of the honour 
 of knighthood conferred on his friend with the honour 
 of Presidency. The Doctor, it may be mentioned in 
 passing, together with another Doctor — Goldsmith — 
 figured on the staff of the new institution, the author of 
 Irene being made professor of ancient literature, and the 
 author of The History of Rome professor of ancient history. 
 
 Among the last words spoken by Johnson _ 
 were words addressed to Reynolds. "I •' 
 have three requests to make," said the 
 dying scholar to the painter : " forgive me 
 thirty pounds which I borrowed from you — read the 
 
 45 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 Scriptures — and abstain from using your pencil on 
 the Sabbath-day." Reynolds forgave the dying moralist 
 the thirty pounds. 
 
 So far nothing has been said here of the pictures of 
 Johnson by Reynolds. The first of these was painted 
 „. ,in i7<;6. It is a half-length in which the 
 
 •' Doctor is presented, pen m hand, at a 
 JO nson table on which are writing materials and 
 books. An engraving of this picture was published by 
 Boswell in his Life of Johnson, The portrait in which 
 Johnson appears without a wig and with hands raised 
 was painted many years afterwards, in 1770, and it was 
 followed by that of 1773, in which the Doctor has his 
 hand upon his waistcoat. This is the portrait in the 
 National Gallery, which to one is "a dull snuffy- 
 coloured picture," while to another — perhaps to most 
 others — it belongs to those marvels of portraiture by 
 which there is achieved a conquest over death. Yet 
 another portrait of Johnson by Reynolds is the one in 
 which the Doctor is presented reading with that difficulty 
 which the near-sighted have, and which necessitates the 
 holding of the written page close to the face. "It is 
 not friendly," said Dr. Johnson, "to hand down to 
 posterity the imperfections of any man." "You will 
 not be known for your defects. Doctor," interposed the 
 ingenuous Mrs. Thrale, "though Sir Joshua should do 
 his worst." Sir Joshua, saying nothing, did his best, 
 which is Boswell's best condensed. Boswell, be it here 
 called to mind, first saw Johnson in Reynolds's counter- 
 feit, and mentions this fact in his account of his first 
 
 46 
 
Byng 
 
 interview with the Doctor, which took place in 1763. 
 "I found," he writes, "that I had a very perfect idea 
 of Johnson's figure, from a portrait of him painted by 
 Sir Joshua Reynolds, soon after he had published his 
 Dictionary, in the attitude of sitting in his easy-chair in 
 deep meditation." 
 
 The pocket-book in which Reynolds entered his 
 sitters for 1756 is lost, and it is possible only to speculate 
 on that year in its relation to the painter. Tom Taylor 
 thinks it the probable date of the portrait of Horace 
 Walpole, which, he points out, was engraved r, . . ^ 
 in 1756. For the rest, he concludes that ^°^^^^^ V 
 this year could scarcely have been a profit- ^^y^ 
 
 able one for the arts of peace, public events ^ ' 
 
 being so alarming in it, for it was in 1756 ' '^ 
 
 that Minorca was lost to England, and early in the year 
 following that , Admiral Byng was executed to meet the 
 popular cry, " Hang Byng, or take care of your King." 
 Reynolds would have had to carry his reputed indiffer- 
 ence to politics to the extreme of callousness not to be 
 moved by an event in which an island upon which he 
 had made a sojourn was lost to his country with 
 consequences so direful to a man who was to be vainly 
 championed — as was Byng — by that very Keppel to 
 whom Reynolds owed the journey that had taken him 
 to Italy vid Minorca. 
 
 However matters may have stood with Reynolds in 
 1756, the pocket-book of the next year shows him to 
 have been in very great demand. Johnson alone sat 
 to him six times in this year. He is entered as "Mr. 
 
 47 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 Johnson," Reynolds at no time styling him Doctor. 
 Among the many other sitters of 1757, special mention 
 may be given to Miss Day and Miss Bishop 
 Sitters of ^j^g pretty, Mrs. Bouverie the beautiful, 
 ^'^' Lady Albemarle the handsome. The last- 
 
 named lady was the mother of Reynolds's friend Keppel, 
 and his portrait of her is in the National Gallery. It 
 is allowed to be an incomparable work. The Duchess, 
 who is represented as sitting, wears a brocade dress of 
 inimitable texture. While, however, the picture of her 
 is in its entirety wonderful and to the last degree 
 decorative, it is none the less the presentment of a 
 woman without a soul. There is a possible explanation 
 of this fact. By severe working of the law of time, the 
 Duchess's face is so blanched as to have lost almost 
 all semblance with life, and the deadness in it may be 
 to a great extent accountable for what seems the soul- 
 lessness in it. The brocade dress, on the other part, 
 has retained its beauty undiminished, if the case be not 
 rather that it has gained in beauty with the years. 
 
 Mr. and Mrs. Buller of King's Nympton, in Devon, 
 are in the sitter-list of Reynolds of 1757; in it is Lady 
 Caroline Fox, wife of the great debater, and to this year 
 is referable an unfinished picture of the second Duke of 
 Marlborough, called while sitting to Reynolds to the 
 seat of war in Germany, where h6 died in the following 
 year. The portrait of Mrs. Thomas Whetham in the 
 South Kensington Museum is also referred to the year 
 
 1757- 
 Increasing practice brought the painter the amazing 
 
 48 
 
Lady Waldegrave (p. 53). 
 
Fighting Men 
 
 number of one hundred and fifty sitters in 1758, the 
 busiest year of his life. In it sat to him Lady Mary 
 Coke, the beautiful heroine of a strange 
 romance, and Mrs. Horneck, the Plymouth ^ ^ -^ 
 beauty, and the beautiful Gunnings, ■'^'•^ 
 
 now severally the Duchess of Hamilton and the 
 Countess of Coventry. In it he painted his portrait 
 of Sir Thomas and Lady Harrison, described as one of 
 his finest and most characteristic pictures. In it he 
 found time to paint Master Mudge, the son of the 
 Plymouth doctor, his friend, and in 1758 he painted 
 Spranger Barry, the actor, of whom it is on record 
 that the great parliamentary orators used to study his 
 acting for the charm of its stately grace and the secret 
 of its pathos. But above all, Reynolds painted fighting 
 men in 1758, among them the uncompromising James 
 O'Hara, Lord Tyrawley, and Commodore Edgcumbe, 
 the friend of his boyhood. Even the name Captain 
 Smith in the sitter-list of 1758 gains interest when it is 
 brought into line with that of the hero of Acre, whose 
 father Captain Smith, himself a hero, was. And 
 Delaval, the macaroni, as painted in that year by 
 Reynolds, has a musket in his hand. Foreign names 
 are not numerous among the names entered in Rey- 
 nolds's pocket-books, but in the sitter-list for 1758 
 occurs that of Prince Czartoryski. 
 
 A young English commoner, still in his teens, who was 
 — none too creditably — to come by the title of " Prince," 
 also sat to Reynolds in 1758. He is entered with the' 
 sitters of February as " Mr. Boothby." Mr. A. Graves, 
 
 49 E 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 who discovered his portrait, gives interesting in- 
 formation on the subject of it and of Mr. Boothby 
 in a paper contributed to the Connoisseur for 
 January 1902, furnished with a full-paged illustra- 
 tion underwrit, "The recently-discovered Portrait of 
 Charles Boothby Skrymshire, aged 18, by Sir J. 
 Reynolds, 1758." 
 
 Two Dukes sat to Reynolds in this year. One 
 
 of them was the Duke of Richmond, who made 
 
 a bid for distinction in arts and arms. 
 
 ^"""y The other was the Duke of Cumberland, 
 
 '^'^ William Augustus of unblessed memory. 
 
 He was the first member of the Royal family to 
 sit to Reynolds, who owed the introduction to him to 
 the Keppel family. The Cumberland who sat to 
 Reynolds in 1758 was not the victor of CuUoden 
 days, not the man elate with his reward of ;<^25,ooo 
 a year and the thanks of Parliament; he was not the 
 " Butcher" red-handed. Reynolds's sitter was a man 
 who was no longer a slayer of men ; was Cumberland 
 after surrender and disarmament of his army; Cumber- 
 land in disgrace, but not so broken-spirited that he 
 did not sit for his picture. The portrait which resulted 
 may be seen in the National Portrait Gallery in London. 
 The paint is dull and muddy, but the painter has caught 
 the cruel sensual mouth of that infamous butcher. He 
 has a strong jaw and a double chin : eating and drink- 
 ing were, it may be gathered, large parts of his life, for 
 the lower part of his face is larger than the upper. 
 Give the devil his due : there is something simple about 
 
 SO 
 
Kitty Fisher 
 
 the man. He wears no stars, and is painted in a red 
 tunic covered by an overcoat. Reynolds, it has been 
 thought, did not care for the sitter, and had no heart in 
 his work, for he left the face muddy. It was probably 
 a case of leaving it as he found it. 
 
 The young and buoyant Prince Edward, afterwards 
 Duke of York, sat to Reynolds in the same year as 
 Cumberland, and in the next year — 1759 — the painter 
 (as one of his biographers puts it) enjoyed the full 
 favours of Leicester House, among his sitters of that 
 year being for the first time the Prince of Wales, after- 
 wards George the Third. 
 
 By an event more epoch-making in his art than the 
 Prince of Wales's first sitting to him, Kitty Fisher sat 
 to Reynolds for the first time in 1759. Kittv 
 
 According to Tom Taylor, who describes p- hp 
 Kitty as " the most celebrated Traviata of ' 
 
 her time," there are seven portraits of her by 
 Reynolds. Of the one accounted the loveliest of these 
 — Kitty is in it painted with doves as dovelike as 
 which she looks — Mr. Pulling has said, "Forget who 
 and what Kitty Fisher was, and who can fail to be 
 charmed ? " It is thought that Kitty sometimes served 
 Reynolds for a model in his " fancy " pictures, such as 
 "A Mother and her Sick Child" in the Dulwich 
 Gallery. This is the bedroom scene in which Death 
 appears with a sickle in his hand. A sickle in a 
 bedroom is, all due allowance made to symboli- 
 sation, essentially out of place, and, by doubtless 
 unintentional humour on the part of the painter, the 
 
 SI 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 matron for whom Kitty is held to have sat looks 
 
 scandalised rather than dismayed. 
 
 Garrick, Woodward, and Barry, the three foremost 
 
 actors of their time, also sat to Reynolds in 1759, Barry 
 
 „ . , having already sat to him the year before. 
 
 Tj/ J J The admired comedian, Harry Woodward, 
 
 , „ ' was painted at least four times by Reynolds, 
 and Barry, .>..,, • j • 
 
 and Garrick s name occurs agam and again 
 
 in the pocket-book entries. " Such as 
 
 he was," says Tom Taylor, " Reynolds has painted 
 
 immeasurably the best portraits of him. There are 
 
 seven of them; that of 1759 was the first. To paint 
 
 Garrick was to come into direct competition with all 
 
 the notable portrait-painters of the time. Everybody 
 
 painted him — Reynolds, Gainsborough, Hayman, Dance, 
 
 Cotes, Hone, Zoffany, Angelica Kauffmann. . . . But 
 
 for the world Garrick is immortalised by the pencil of 
 
 Reynolds; and chiefly by that happy allegory of him 
 
 between Tragedy and Comedy, painted two years after 
 
 this." " That happy allegory " also commended itself to 
 
 Leslie, who wrote : " The thought of placing Garrick 
 
 between Tragedy and Comedy was a happy one. The 
 
 great actor, who began his career in the service of the 
 
 Tragic Muse, seems unable to resist the allurements of 
 
 her rival. He throws an appealing, half-ashamed look 
 
 towards his first love, who, it must be confessed, is a 
 
 very inadequate personification of Tragedy. Reynolds 
 
 did not paint the Tragic Muse till she sat to him herself, 
 
 in the form of Mrs. Siddons." 
 
 To those who have no admiration for allegory of the 
 
 52 
 
Malone 
 
 sort extolled by Leslie and Taylor may be recommended 
 the portrait of Garrick and his Wife, into which no 
 element other than the simply human enters. The 
 actor and Mrs. Garrick are in this picture represented 
 after twenty-five years of marriage, lovers still. 
 
 Though the pocket-book for 1759 records one hundred 
 and forty-eight sitters, Reynolds that year found time 
 to write three papers to the Idler. His sitters included 
 some persons other than those already named here who 
 call for mention. The Countess of Albemarle sat to 
 him in 1759 with her two daughters, the Ladies 
 Caroline and Elizabeth Keppel, the picture which 
 resulted being one of the most admired of the painter's 
 works. The " beautiful Gunnings," as wives, were 
 this year painted together; and the lovely Countess of 
 Waldegrave, Horace Walpole's niece, was painted by 
 him this year for the first time of many times. 
 Soldiers and sailors sat to him; among the soldiers, 
 Colonel Clavering, " covered with more laurels than 
 a boar's head" (the description is Horace Walpole's, 
 penned in 1759), and among the sailors Captain Byron, 
 with his nickname " Foul-weather Jack." 
 
 In 1759 Malone first sat to Reynolds, sitting to him 
 often afterwards, with the result that they became 
 closely intimate. Hence the importance of 
 Malone in connection with Reynolds, whose ' 
 
 life he was to write. The picture of the ^'^^ 
 
 biographer-to-be which hangs in the National Portrait 
 Gallery presents a man with a face of boyish pinkness 
 and freshness, and a head of so odd a 'shape — in this 
 
 53 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 matter not quite singular among the heads painted by 
 the same hand — that the question has been asked if 
 Reynolds occasionally did not draw rightly. It may be 
 whispered that he occasionally drew very wrongly. 
 
 In the entries for 1759 is the name " Miss Rey- 
 nolds." According to Leslie, Reynolds painted his 
 sister at intervals from May 1755 to April 
 ^Ti/r-^ * i7S9» ^"'^ ^^^ face, as described by him, is 
 D "7^ round, the features are small, and the re- 
 Reynolds ggn^biance to her brother is striking. The 
 boy Master Mudge had been painted in his own char- 
 acter by Reynolds in 1758; in 1759 another boy, Master 
 Cox, was painted by him in the character of Young 
 Hannibal. 
 
 The worthless took their turn with the worthy among 
 the sitters to Reynolds, who in 1759 painted Lord 
 March, afterwards Duke of Queensberry, the "Old 
 Q." of shameful memory. In this year, too, La Rena, 
 whose reign was drawing to a close, was painted by the 
 painter of Lord March, long her admirer. 
 
 While portrait-painting, it will be seen, throughout 
 his career primarily engaged Reynolds, he did not give 
 his time exclusively to it. It is unknown at what date 
 he produced his curious humoresque, known 
 The Infant ^^ ...pj^^ \ni^n\. Samuel Johnson," being his 
 conception of the philosopher at the age of 
 •' " two years, embodied in a picture which is 
 
 perhaps the best heavy joke that was ever perpetrated. 
 In a graver mood he painted the picture known as 
 "Venus," of which it is on record that the head was 
 
 54 
 
Card-playing 
 
 painted from a beautiful girl aged sixteen and the flesh- 
 tint of the body from a year-old naked babe. This 
 picture was last of the many painted in 1759. 
 
 Thus was brought to a close the work of the 'fifties, 
 a busy time with Reynolds, but one in which he would 
 seem to have relieved work with play, if 
 not with play at White's, where play ran ^ 
 
 higher than he relished. With Shafto and . 
 the Vernons, General Guise and Sir John -^ 
 
 Ligonier among his sitters, and Wilkes and the Keppels 
 among his friends, says Leslie, he must have heard 
 enough of the play at White's and the fate of its 
 victims. Doubtless he must, and, obviously, he steered 
 a warier course than they at White's, howbeit to the 
 last he played, and brought to the contemplation of 
 picture-cards an interest in which the painter had no 
 part. 
 
 55 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 
 PORTRAITS OF THE EARLY 'SIXTIES: STERNE AND OTHERS. 
 [1760-65.] 
 
 The first exhibition of his pictures on the part of 
 Reynolds took place in 1760 at the Society of Arts, 
 jj,. , which was the parent of the Incorporated 
 
 F h'h'f Society of Artists in 1765, by secession from 
 J. which was constituted the Royal Academy, 
 
 Tf j.j , the first exhibition of which took place in 
 p. . 1769. To this decade therefore belongs the 
 
 last work of Joshua Reynolds, who, as Presi- 
 dent of the Royal Academy, was knighted on the 21st 
 of April in 1769. 
 
 On the occasion of his first public exhibition of his 
 work in 1760, Reynolds showed his quality in four 
 portraits presenting severally the Duchess of Hamilton, 
 Lady Elizabeth Keppel, a Gentleman (unnamed), and a 
 member of the Vernon family in armour, in an attitude 
 said to have been taken from Vandyke. The portrait of 
 the Duchess is worthy of its original, the beautiful 
 Elizabeth Gunning, and the portrait of the other Eliza- 
 beth has been praised for the expression inimitably 
 maidenly and gentle given to this lady. 
 
 It was in this year that Reynolds moved to Leicester 
 
 56 
 
Kitty Fisher (p. 51), 
 
Changes of Residence 
 
 Square, where he spent the remainder of his life, and 
 where he set up a chariot. To have followed him so far 
 from one London home to another is to have 
 followed a painter's progress with an interest . 
 
 all its own. First we found him in St. Mar- 
 tin's Lane, described by Allan Cunningham as ^ 
 
 "then [1746] the favourite residence of artists, where 
 something which resembled an academy was estab- 
 lished." The writer who so describes St. Martin's 
 Lane in one place in another terms it " the Grub 
 Street of artists." It was a favourite resort of 
 literary men of the time, as the site of Slaughter's 
 Coifee House, which numbered Pope among its patrons. 
 Not in it, but within a stone's-throw of it, was the Pine 
 Apple Tavern, where Johnson, on his coming to London 
 ten years before this time, " dined very well for eight- 
 pence, with very good company." With increasing 
 work and wealth, Reynolds, as we have seen, was able 
 to shift his quarters from St. Martin's Lane to Newport 
 Street. The distance traversed was not great, but the 
 new house taken was impressively handsome, and with a 
 short lapse of time a still finer house was to be taken, 
 the one in Leicester Square. Thus Reynolds's wander- 
 ings in search of a dwelling-place never took him, it 
 may be noticed, far from his original place of abode. 
 
 Among his sitters of 1760 was the redoubtable sailor 
 with his nickname "Yellow Jack"; and three soldiers 
 who stand out from many who sat to Reynolds in 
 that year are Lord Granby, then in his heyday of 
 favour, Colonel Trapaud, the plucky and the lucky, 
 
 57 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 and Lord Ligonier, the honoured veteran, Reynolds's 
 picture of whom on horseback may be seen in the 
 c. y^ f National Gallery in London. Lord Ligonier 
 - ^ has a fine, old-young face, with a French 
 look in it which answers to the French 
 look in his name. Unhappily, the horse on which he 
 is mounted is a magnified toy-rocking-horse which is 
 on the backward rock, the soldier astride of it looking 
 no whit excited, and barely keeping back a smile. 
 The leg and foot which are towards the spectator of 
 the picture are also lamentably drawn, especially the 
 foot. On the other hand, the trappings of horse and 
 man are delightfully painted. Woodward sat again 
 to Reynolds in 1760; Giardini, the opera-manager, 
 sat to him; and La Rena and Nelly O'Brien gave him 
 sittings. The portrait of Nelly O'Brien of 1760 is not 
 considered the loveliest of her, the one to which that 
 praise is accorded being the portrait which Reynolds 
 painted three years later. The Nelly of it in the Wallace 
 Collection is a hatted lady with a delicious Irish face, 
 witty and wistful. Among a crowd of titled ladies who 
 sat to Reynolds in his first year of residence in Leicester 
 Square may be named Lady Waldegrave, of whom one 
 learns with no surprise that Reynolds never seemed to 
 tire of painting her. To name least last, "Master 
 Bouverie " sat to the great man of Leicester Square in 
 1760. He is painted as a baby in the picture of his 
 lovely mother, and the result is one of Reynolds's 
 striking Mother-and-Babe pictures, less of the heavens 
 heavenly than those of the Renascence painters, but by 
 
 58 
 
Coronation 
 
 no means on that account to be called of the earth 
 earthy. They have a character entirely their own and 
 lovely. In 1760, too, sat Sterne, who would appear to 
 have sat to Reynolds for the first time on a Sunday. 
 The parson sitting, and the parson's son painting — what 
 would Dr. Johnson have said to it ? Sterne was at this 
 time at the zenith of his popularity. His head was 
 entirely turned, and Reynolds — very cleverly, if a little 
 malignly — painted him with wig askew. 
 
 Exhibiting for the second time in 1761, Reynolds was 
 seen in a three-quarter portrait of Lady Waldegrave, 
 wearing a turban; in a whole-length of the Duke of 
 Beaufort, wearing his college robes; and in a whole- 
 length of Captain Orme with a horse. The last-named 
 picture is in the National Gallery. The ^,. , 
 Captain is a pallid, histrionic-looking young •' 
 
 man, with one hand on a very unsatisfactory ' 
 
 horse. The great social event of the year 1761 in 
 England was of course the marriage and coronation 
 of the King. Reynolds did not paint the thief actors 
 in these ceremonies, but he painted the most beauti- 
 ful in them — the Queen's bridesmaids. Two of them 
 were the Ladies Elizabeth and Caroline Keppel, and 
 another was Lady Caroline Russell. The Lady Eliza- 
 beth is painted full-length in her state costume, adorning 
 the statue of Hymen with flowers. The bridesmaid, 
 whom the bridegroom in that royal ceremony had loved — 
 the Lady Sarah Lennox — was painted in a group begun in 
 this year, the beautiful Holland House picture of Lady 
 Sarah Lennox and Lady Susan Strangways with Charles 
 
 59 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 James Fox, the cousin of Lady Susan, as a lad aged 
 thirteen. Two more pictures of Fox in his teens were 
 painted by Reynolds. Among other notable sitters of 
 1761 was the wit George Selwyn; in this year there 
 sat to Reynolds Lord Pulteney and Admiral Rodney; 
 and in it the Duke of Cumberland and Kitty Fisher sat 
 to him again. He could not complain of sameness in 
 his sitters. The account of Pulteney given by Reynolds 
 may be perused at the National Portrait Gallery. The 
 statesman will be there found presented in what has 
 been termed a complete picture of body, soul, and 
 clothes. The praise accorded to the picture of the 
 body and clothes — the last-named the gorgeous robes 
 of a peer — calls for no abatement; but it is necessary 
 to say that it was denied to Reynolds to present the 
 complete picture of the soul of any one, even when he 
 was at his best, which he was not in painting Lord 
 Pulteney. 
 
 To the Exhibition of 1762 were sent the picture of 
 Garrick between Tragedy and Comedy, the picture of 
 Lady Elizabeth Keppel as bridesmaid, and that of the 
 Countess Waldegrave as Dido embracing Cupid. In 
 all these pictures Reynolds degraded his beautiful art 
 to pander to the Georgian love of allegory and myth. 
 
 Among the sitters of 1762 to whom there is given 
 
 pocket-book enumeration, the most noteworthy are 
 
 perhaps Kitty Fisher, Nelly O'Brien, Prin- 
 
 •^ cess Amelia (they are named here in the 
 
 ' sequence of entry), Lady Waldegrave, Lord 
 
 Errol, General Napier, Lady Sarah Lennox, the Duke 
 
 60 
 
Bute 
 
 of Marlborough, Lady Mary Coke, Mr. Mudge, Sir W. 
 Baker, Mr. Baker, Miss Craunch, and Mr. Woodward. " 
 
 The pretty sitter called in one entry of this year Miss 
 Nelly O'Brien is in another jocosely entered as " My 
 Lady O'Brien." The picture of Lord Errol is described 
 as a magnificent Colossus in cloth of gold, as he 
 appeared at the coronation. Sir W. Baker and Mr. 
 Baker were father and son, both of Plympton, for which 
 town they sat in the House ; and Miss Craunch was the 
 daughter of Reynolds's aforetime sponsor-in-art, also 
 of Plympton. 
 
 The year 1763 was memorable in England as that in 
 which the Scottish premier, Bute, brought unpopularity 
 upon all Scotsmen, expressed in divers 
 ways, among them the way of Johnson, •' 
 
 who this year for the first time crossed the ' ^ 
 
 path of Boswell, unwarily led into confiding to the 
 Doctor that he came from Scotland. Reynolds painted 
 Bute in all his glory in 1763 — his glory of that time 
 consisting mainly of blue velvet and gold lace. With 
 him in the picture was his under-secretary, the " King's 
 Friend " of a later date. A picture of Lady Pembroke 
 also belongs to 1763 — it presents a beautiful woman 
 who figured in a very unbeautiful story — and in that 
 year was painted the Princess Augusta. A very noble 
 picture of 1763 has for its subject John Earl of Rothes, 
 and "a very pretty picture," in Walpole's naming of it, 
 adds another to the many very pretty pictures of Nelly 
 O'Brien. 
 
 The eighteenth century was a time when ladies who 
 6t 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 did not spend their lives making samplers in seclusion 
 took an open part in politics, and of such ladies Rey- 
 nolds painted six in the Duchess of Richmond, Lady 
 Sandes, Lady Rockingham, Mrs. Fitzroy, Lady Mary 
 Coke, and Lady Pembroke. 
 
 It was a time of many women whose faces were their 
 fortunes, in this respect unlike the lady who sat to 
 Reynolds as Miss Draycote in January, and 
 Stt^rs of ^g Lady Pomfret in May of 1764. This rich 
 ^' ^ heiress was rendered unbeautiful by her 
 
 obesity, which was such as to cause a wit of the time 
 ■ to say that her tonnage was equal to her poundage. 
 The two archbishops sat to Reynolds in 1764, and by 
 the unconscious irony which marks the pocket-book 
 K F' hp s°t"2S, the two persons named Kitty and 
 
 ar /-v D • ' Nelly are found to have been of those who 
 
 iv. O Brten . , . . , 
 
 f' occupied m turn the chair in turn occupied 
 
 by the archbishops. Reynolds exhibited 
 
 only two pictures in 1764, portraits of the Lady Sarah 
 
 Bunbury and Lady Waldegrave. Lady Waldegrave, 
 
 newly a widow, is painted in widow's weeds. 
 
 In this year, as in other years, gallant men alternated 
 
 with beautiful women among the sitters of Reynolds. 
 
 To 1764 belongs his brave picture of brave Prince 
 
 Lippe. This sovereign of a German principality must 
 
 be numbered with the royal persons painted by 
 
 Reynolds. A Londoner by birth, he was the good 
 
 friend of England of his time, and one the more to be 
 
 esteemed that he possessed in equal measure the 
 
 qualities of a scholar, soldier, and statesman. Many 
 
 62 
 
Mrs. Abington 
 
 others not here named are in the pocket-book entries. 
 Special mention may be given to Mrs. Collyear, 
 whose brother married Goldsmith's "Jessamy Bride," 
 and who is painted as Lesbia weeping over her 
 swallow. Of Lord Shelburne, in 1764 a Commissioner 
 for Trade, Reynolds painted several pictures. There 
 is one in the National Portrait Gallery which has 
 been censured as suggesting nothing concerning the 
 man who sat for it, and as suggesting concerning the 
 punter . only that he did not take much pains with it. 
 The quality of mercy is sometimes strained. The Miss 
 Horneck painted by Reynolds in 1764 was Goldsmith's 
 "Little Comedy," afterwards Mrs. Bunbury. Mrs. 
 Trapaud was the beautiful wife of the Colonel of that, 
 name, and the picture of her painted by Reynolds in 
 1764 has been described as one of his sweetest portraits. 
 The man of the wonderful name Samson Gideon was 
 the son of the Rothschild of his day, the great loan- 
 contractor Gideon. Sir Samson was raised to the 
 peerage, with the title of Lord Eardly. 
 
 The name Mrs. Abington in the pocket-book of 
 1764 calls for notice. This was the actress to be 
 painted so often and so lovingly by Reynolds. "Arch 
 and lively" are the words with which her admirers 
 describe her. One of them rightly says that she was 
 a prime favourite with Reynolds, and adds: " He has 
 never expressed sly archness better than in her sidelong 
 face as the Comic Muse." 
 
 Henry Fox, first Lord Holland, who had sat for 
 Reynolds in 1762, sat again for him in 1764. " Cynical, 
 
 63 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 but always good-tempered," so Tom Taylor describes 
 him. Sir Joshua on one occasion was a match for him, 
 according to a story left on record by Northcote, and 
 given here : — 
 
 "When he drew the portrait of Fox, first Lord 
 Holland, the picture being finished. Lord Holland 
 asked him what his price was for it, and being informed 
 the astonished Lord exclaimed with much surprise at 
 its greatness, at the same time saying, ' You get your 
 money very quick, for it did not take you much time. 
 How long was you about this picture ? ' when Sir 
 Joshua quickly answered, ' All my life.' " ^ 
 
 So much for the year 1764 considered in connection 
 
 with the art of Reynolds. It has to be added that it 
 
 was in this year that he threw out the suggestion that 
 
 led to the foundation of the Literary Club. 
 
 f,, , He had not evolved the idea of it unaided, if 
 
 ' the truth of the matter is stated in Prior's 
 
 ' ■' Life of Malone, where may be read, as 
 
 pointed out by Tom Taylor: "It is rather remarkable 
 
 that this celebrated social assemblage of talent might 
 
 almost ascribe its origin to the Irish peer (Lord 
 
 Charlemont). Some words had dropped from him on 
 
 the subject to Reynolds. The latter mentioned it to 
 
 Johnson, proposing his lordship as one of the first 
 
 members. 'No,' was the reply, 'we shall be called 
 
 ' Vide Menioriah of an Eighteenth Century Painter, by Stephen 
 Gwynn, who comments in reference to Sir Joshua's retort : " This 
 saying recalls an epigram uttered by Mr. Whistler on one of his 
 numerous appearances in the witness-box." 
 
 64 
 
Sterne (p. 59). 
 
Barry 
 
 Charlemont's Club; let him come in afterwards.'" The 
 story is very credible. 
 
 The year which followed that of the foundation of 
 the Literary Club witnessed the publication of Johnson's 
 Shakespeare, in which Reynolds made his bow to the 
 public as a Shakespeare commentator. It is not inap- 
 propriate that the poet who has touched on every 
 branch of knowledge should have a painter among his 
 commentators, and the comments of Reynolds on 
 Shakespeare are exceedingly interesting. 
 
 Three Irishmen, remarkably different one from the 
 other, were this year much in touch with Reynolds — 
 Goldsmith, already his friend; Burke, who was to be 
 his friend; and Barry, who was to hate him and be 
 hated by him in return. 
 
 The story of Barry forms one of the saddest chapters 
 
 in the history of Reynolds, so calamitous was the result 
 
 of this youngr painter's actingr upon the teach- „, „ 
 
 c\, ij „T3^ ^„ T, The Story 
 
 ing of the older one. "Barry, says Tom -^ 
 
 Taylor, in treating of him at a later period, •' ^^ 
 
 "of all the young painters, had most steadily and 
 
 courageously followed the road pointed out by Sir 
 
 Joshua in his lectures. He had striven exclusively after 
 
 the grand style." The will was strong in Barry, and no 
 
 man ever more than he showed that the will for the 
 
 deed in art is lamentably inadequate. Acting upon 
 
 counsels given to the last by Reynolds, and with the 
 
 lapse of time more and more despising the preacher 
 
 who did not practise what he preached, but left it to 
 
 others to follow a track that led to a stony desert, 
 
 65 . F 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 Barry lapsed into a heart-numbing hatred of the man 
 who, on their first becoming known to each other, 
 had won his warm admiration. It has been said that 
 Reynolds returned his hate in kind. In the general 
 acceptance of the word failure, Barry was Reynolds's 
 only failure incarnated, and comprehensibly caused 
 abatement of the complacence habitual to one who 
 was accustomed to success. 
 
 The veneration which, at the beginning of their 
 acquaintance, the young Irishman had for Reynolds was 
 not stinted in the case of the two pictures 
 Exhtbtts ggj^j. ^^ j.jjg Exhibition of 1765 by Reynolds. 
 V ^7 5 One of them represented " Lady Sarah 
 Bunbury sacrificing to the Graces." This mythologising 
 of a lady called Bunbury highly commended the portrait 
 of her to Barry, who wrote exultingly of "the great 
 advance of portrait-painting since, it got into the hands 
 of Mr. Reynolds." Mrs. Piozzi was less appreciative of 
 the presentment of Lady Sarah. " She never did" 
 objected Mrs. Piozzi, " sacrifice to the Graces. Her 
 face was gloriously handsome, but she used to play 
 cricket and eat beefsteaks on the Steyne at Brighton." 
 These words should be laid to heart by those who 
 picture our ancestresses as uniformly sacrificing to the 
 Graces. 
 
 The list of sitters for 1765 is described as smaller 
 
 than that for any preceding year. It is a 
 
 long one none the less. Fox sat again to 
 
 ■^ ' ^ Reynolds in 1765, and so did Lady Walde- 
 
 grave, and Mrs. Abington, and Nelly O'Brien, and 
 
 66 
 
Retrospect 
 
 the Misses Horneck, the last-named sisters beautiful 
 girls, still little more than children. 
 
 Such were the first five years spent by Reynolds in 
 Leicester Square, the period in which he produced his 
 masterly portrait of Sterne, and his most beautiful 
 portraits of Kitty Fisher and Nelly O'Brien. 
 
 67 
 
CHAPTER VI. 
 
 PORTRAITS OF THE LATER 'SIXTIES: 
 GOLDSMITH AND OTHERS. 
 
 [1766-70.] 
 
 "The impress of the Rockingham administration is 
 apparent on Reynolds's sitters for 1766," writes Tom 
 Taylor. " Lord Albemarle and Sir Charles Saunders, 
 the Dukes of Portland and Devonshire, Lord Hard- 
 wicke. General Conway, Mr. Burke, and Lord Rock- 
 ingham himself, successively took their places in 
 Reynolds's chair." 
 
 "This year," he says further, "saw the first com- 
 manding strides of Reynolds's greatest and closest 
 friend, Edmund Burke, on that public career 
 which opened when he took his seat for 
 Wendover. . . . Burke was the foremost man — as 
 orator, as writer, as counsellor, as guide. Never, in 
 all parliamentary experience before or since, was such 
 a position so taken by storm. The mutual regard of 
 Reynolds and Burke was so strong that it is impossible 
 not to believe that every one of these triumphs had its 
 separate joy for the quiet painter in Leicester Fields. 
 All his parliamentary sitters must have been sounding 
 
 68 
 
Famous Irishmen 
 
 Burke's praises, or grumbling at his audacity. We 
 can easily conceive how Reynolds shifted his trumpet 
 when some old courtier or place-man, like Halifax or 
 Carysfort, some thick-and-thin King's friend, like 
 Dyson or Selwyn, or some macaroni, like Sir Charles 
 Bunbury or Mr. Crewe, took up the fashionable sneer 
 against 'the Irish adventurer.'" 
 
 While Burke astonished all hearers. Goldsmith en- 
 chanted all readers. The Vicar of Wakefield being 
 published this year, and meeting with signal _ , , 
 success. Reynolds was to paint both Gold- 
 smith and Burke at the height of their fame, and was 
 to paint an Irishman whose fame in their day was little 
 less than theirs, though now he is well-nigh forgotten. 
 This was Isaac Barr^ — to give to his name of Barry the 
 Frenchified form which he gave to it — a brave soldier 
 turned a brave speaker, formidable even, writes one 
 who loved him not, to the great Commoner himself. 
 Barrd had a best side to his face (a bullet-wound had 
 disfigured the other), and Reynolds, one learns with no 
 surprise, turned the best side out. 
 
 Some have thought that he did not deal as kindly by 
 Goldsmith, who sat to him for the first time in 1766. 
 It is thought that Reynolds became acquainted with the 
 poet in 1762. They were probably intimate in 1764, in 
 which year Goldsmith published "The Traveller." It 
 will be remembered that in this poem, in dealing with 
 Italy, Goldsmith lays especial stress on the poverty and 
 degradation of that land as seen by him, and contrasted 
 by him in his thought with the Italy of a former time, a 
 
 69 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 land of wealth and splendour. The following passage 
 contains a grudging concession : — 
 
 " Yet still the loss of wealth is here supplied 
 By arts, the splendid wrecks of former pride ; 
 From these the feeble heart and long-fallen mind 
 An easy compensation seem to find. 
 Here may be seen, in bloodless pomp array'd, 
 The pasteboard triumph and the cavalcade ; 
 Processions form'd for piety and love, 
 A mistress or a saint in every grove. 
 By sports like this are all their cares beguiled, 
 The sports of children satisfy the child." 
 
 A legend has it that Reynolds entered Goldsmith's 
 lodging-room while the poet was writing those lines, 
 accompanying the action by throwing glances at a dog 
 which had been taught by him to sit upright on its 
 haunches in the attitude called " begging," and which 
 he compelled it to maintain while he wrote. The ink 
 on the line "The sports of children satisfy the child " 
 being still wet as Reynolds perused the written page, he 
 twitted, we are told, the poet who belittled art, and 
 who allowed that the pastime with the dog had given 
 birth to the idea embodied in the line. However it 
 may stand with that story, it is true that there was 
 established' between Reynolds and Goldsmith a life-long 
 friendship, which was marked by both with acts of love. 
 Thus Goldsmith dedicated his "Deserted Village" to 
 Reynolds in words of a striking simphcity and tender- 
 ness ; and Reynolds on his part dedicated to Goldsmith 
 
 70 
 
Goldsmith 
 
 the engraving of his picture called " Resignation," with 
 a quotation from "The Deserted Village" affixed to it. 
 
 That was five years after Goldsmith's first sitting to 
 Reynolds in 1766. In the meantime there had been 
 painted the remarkable portrait of Goldsmith exhibited 
 by Reynolds in 1770 — one ennobled, says Tom Taylor, 
 by such an expression of dignity and tenderness 
 as few but Reynolds could see in Goldsmith's face. 
 Leslie notes "the ideal drapery," and the absence 
 of a wig. The last-named point is especially com- 
 mendable, for the hair is beautiful, and the splendid 
 shape of the head and brow is shown. To gaze 
 long at the picture is to find more and more in 
 it that holds the attention. The look in the deep-set 
 eyes is found to be haunting, and the straight strong 
 nose commands admiration. The shaven mouth, long 
 upper-lipped and heavy, and the shaven chin, receding 
 and doubled, give all the downright ugliness that is to 
 be found in the face, and the gazer is set lamenting that 
 Goldsmith followed a fashion that only favoured men 
 with faultless mouths and chins, and did not avail him- 
 self of Nature's beneficent remedy in the case of a male 
 mouth and chin not beautiful to behold. Not to stint 
 praise where praise in full measure is due to Reynolds's 
 picture of Goldsmith, it may be added that the bared 
 neck of the poet has character and strength, and the 
 hand that holds the book is fine, —f '*- 
 
 It is allowed that the face of Goldsmith and that of 
 Ugolino are the saddest faces painted by Reynolds. An 
 Irishman sat for Ugolino as for Goldsmith, and the 
 
 71 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 brooding' sadness of both is essentially Irish. There 
 follows here a comment by Allan Cunningham : "That 
 Reynolds was an improver of human faces no one 
 could be more conscious than Goldsmith; his por- 
 trait by Reynolds is sufficiently unlovely, yet it was 
 said by the artist's sister to be the most flattered 
 likeness of all her brother's works." It needed per- 
 haps the eye of Blake to note the beauty in Gold- 
 smith. "It is pleasant to think," writes an editor* 
 of the poems of this strange man, "that while yet a 
 boy, in his position of apprentice to an engraver, 
 Blake was brought into contact with notable people, and 
 that he once at least did, at his master's shop, see the 
 sweet-souled author of The Vicar of Wakefield, ' whose 
 finely marked head he gazed at, and thought to himself 
 how much he should like to have such a head when 
 he grew to be a man.' " Unlovely as seemed to Allan 
 Cunningham Reynolds's portrait of Goldsmith, it satis- 
 fied the sensitive Irish poet, who let his love for the 
 painter of it overflow in the portrait of him which he in 
 his turn painted as one in a series of portraits called 
 "Retaliation." Who does not know Goldsmith's 
 picture of Reynolds in the semblance of an epitaph ? — 
 
 " Here Reynolds is laid ; and to tell you my mind, 
 He has not left a wiser or better behind. 
 His pencil was striking, resistless, and grand; 
 His manners were gentle, complying, and bland; 
 Still born to improve us in every part, 
 His pencil our faces, his manners our heart. 
 
 ^ Joseph Skipsey. 
 72 
 
Young Fox with Ladies (p. 59). 
 
Angelica KaufFmann 
 
 To coxcombs averse, yet most civilly steering; 
 When they judged without skill he was still hard of 
 
 hearing : 
 When they talked of their Raphaels, Correggios, and 
 
 stuff. 
 He shifted his trumpet, and only took snuff. 
 By flattery unspoiled . . . " 
 
 And so it ends ; for death overtook the gentle eulogist. 
 While the leading men among his contemporaries all 
 sat to Reynolds in 1766, the leading women among them 
 did so no less. Mrs. Abington, whose pretti- 
 ness made her an admired actress, sat again _. -^ 
 
 to him, and Angelica Kauffmann, whose 
 prettiness helped to make her an admired ' 
 
 painter, sat to him. Leslie, who points out that 
 Reynolds's pocket-book of 1766 has frequent entries of 
 " Miss Angelica," adds: "This is the pretty and graceful 
 Angelica KaufFmann, whose pictures, feeble as they are, 
 were thought wonderful in her own time." That depre- 
 ciation of Angelica KaufFmann was penned at a time 
 when Leslie's pictures, feeble as they are, were con- 
 sidered wonderful; and it being generally allowed 
 to-day by those who are to be counted with that Leslie 
 as critic is as untrustworthy as he is as painter, the 
 safest course for readers of this to follow in 
 the case of Angelica KaufFmann will be to ^ 
 secure another opinion on her work, or to -^^ 
 form one at first hand regarding it. At South Kensing- 
 ton Museum there are three paintings by her. One is 
 a picture of Emma Hart, afterwards Lady Hamilton. 
 
 73 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 It presents the famous beauty in the likeness of a thick- 
 set servant-girl with a comely face. One pretty woman 
 never portrayed another pretty woman more cruelly. 
 The other two paintings present severally a Nymph and 
 Swain. The nymph is in each case long-limbed to an 
 extent that gives cause for gratulation that she does not 
 stand erect dwarfing the trees in her environment, and 
 the swain in both cases maintains an attitude that could 
 only be maintained in paint. When it is added that 
 Angelica Kauifmann's colouring, which unpleasantly 
 recalls the article of commerce known as "fancy" soap, 
 is as unsatisfactory as her drawing ; that in the case of 
 one of the aforesaid Nymph-and-Swain pictures the 
 composition anticipates Lord Leighton (small credit to 
 Angelica, and great discredit to Lord Leighton); that 
 in no case what is best, while in many cases what is far 
 from best in later art, is seen in her work, — when all 
 that is said, it only remains to be added that there 
 is a quality in it which unfitted Leslie for passing 
 adverse judgment upon it. It consists in an equal 
 measure of gravity and grace, producing that next thing 
 to exquisitiveness known as elegance, and marking the 
 work of Angelica KaufFmann almost as uniformly as the 
 absence of it marks the work of Leslie, even in cases in 
 which elegance was imperatively demanded. It is this 
 feature in the work of Angelica KaufFmann that renders 
 it so pleasing when reduced to black and white, this case 
 in especial holding good of her pictures containing no 
 male figures, whether they be pictures allegorical, 
 such as her "Venus Attired by the Graces," or be 
 
 74 
 
"Miss Angel" 
 
 samples of poetic portraiture such as her ' ' Lady Rush- 
 out and her Daughter." Moreover, the professional 
 modesty which to the last characterised this admired 
 woman had for one excellent result that she rarely cut 
 her canvas big, and often cut it noticeably small, as 
 when she cut it for the three pictures which are stowed 
 away in a corner of South Kensington Museum, 
 
 Thus much of Angelica as artist. It will be remem- 
 bered that she was elected an original member of the 
 Royal Academy, sharing this honour with another 
 woman, Mary Moser, the flower-painter. At a prior 
 time Reynolds had said of Liotard, ' ' His pictures are 
 just what the ladies do when they paint for amusement." 
 For ladies who thus occupied themselves he had frank 
 contempt, but he extended his full admiration to women 
 who competed, as he deemed, successfully with men- 
 workers in the field of art. It' was to be expected 
 that this attitude of mind would be misconstrued. 
 " Her name," says Leslie of Angelica Kauifmann, " is 
 sometimes contracted into ' Miss Angel,' and once 
 has the suggestive addition ' Fiori.' Had Reynolds 
 been reminding himself to buy her flowers ? She had 
 come to London only the year before [1765], under the 
 protection of Lady Wentworth. . . . Report gave 
 Reynolds out as an admirer of the accomplished 
 Angelica. He painted her portrait twice ; and she 
 painted his." This was quite enough to make them 
 the subject of match-making gossip. In fact, though 
 Reynolds was a known denunciator of marriage in the 
 case of painters — "You are ruined for an artist," was 
 
 75 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 his comment upon the marriage of Flaxman, and some 
 have held that to him is due part of the heavy blame 
 attached to Romney for his neglect of his wife — the 
 wagging of the world's tongue of the time was in 
 great measure set going by his supposititious matri- 
 monial intentions towards women who shared the 
 urbanity extended by him to all. Fanny Burney, 
 Angelica Kauffmann, possibly even Hannah More, of 
 whom it may be read that at one time he " carried 
 her to see his own and other pictures," are a few 
 of the many distinguished women among his con- 
 temporaries named as having enchained the heart of 
 the bachelor-painter, concerning whom it can as little 
 be proven that he loved any of these ladies as it can 
 be proven that he loved a lady who — in this respect 
 unlike those heretofore enumerated — apparently loved 
 him. 
 
 In days when the publishing of love-letters was of 
 less common occurrence than it has latterly become, 
 _. the English public was invited to peruse 
 
 ^ " Sir Joshua Reynolds's Love- Letters," 
 •^ which, to the number of three, appeared 
 
 in October of 1857 in the literary periodical 
 named Willis's Current Notes. "There is no 
 love in these letters," says one reader of them, "un- 
 less there be any tenderness insinuated in the writer's 
 remark that his lips are spoiled for kissing by the 
 accident at Minorca." It being borne in mind that 
 the writer at the time in which these letters were 
 written was in the twenties, it is less indefensible to 
 
 76 
 
A Sad Coquette 
 
 regard him as the lover of the lady to whom he wrote,'- 
 than it is to regard him as the lover of Angelica 
 Kauffmann, whose acquaintance he first made when 
 a bachelor of the reflecting age of forty-three. 
 
 As for Angelica, she was probably not vilified by 
 Smith, the author of the Life of Nollekens, who dubbed 
 her a sad coquette, and who has left it 
 on record that " once she professed to be 
 enamoured of Nathaniel Dance ; to the -^ 
 
 next visitor she would disclose that she '^ ^^"^ 
 was dying for Sir Joshua Reynolds." sir -^'**'-^'*'*" 
 Joshua, naturally level-headed, will have had the less 
 difiiculty in not seriously succumbing to the charms 
 of Angelica, that he probably knew what was the 
 talk of the town regarding her and Nathaniel Dance. 
 "She was once," so this talk is retailed by the writer 
 of an article on her, contributed to Womanhood of July 
 1901, "seen in a private box at Drury Lane, standing 
 between Nathaniel Dance and Fuseli. Each had an 
 arm round her waist, and she contrived to squeeze 
 the hand of each." 
 
 It taxes credulity heavily to believe that the painters 
 Dance and Fuseli can have lent themselves to the 
 joint production of that living picture, and whatever 
 may be the truth regarding it, the mere fact that the 
 talk of the town should have busied itself with 
 Angelica KauiFmann as it did, may be accepted as 
 
 ' Her name was Weston, and she was painted by him in 1757, 
 exactly a hundred years prior to the publication of the love-letters in 
 question. 
 
 77 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 sufficiently demonstrating that she wakened in the 
 bachelor Reynolds no feeling other than that which 
 characteristically prompted him to enter this pretty 
 woman among his sitters as " Miss Angel," and, with 
 a tell-tale precision, to make a written memorandum 
 of his intention to bestow on her a gift of flowers. 
 
 It is noticeable that the weavers of romance about 
 the name of Reynolds have never, so far as is known 
 to the present writer, coupled it as perhaps 
 yf^^j, a lover's with that of Lady Waldegrave, 
 
 painted so often and so lovingly by him. 
 ^ Tom Taylor tells how he found in the side- 
 
 pocket of Reynolds's memorandum-book for the year 
 1759 (that in which was first painted the Countess) a 
 delicate golden-brown tress in a paper inscribed " Lady 
 Waldegrave. " This tress, the discoverer of it liked to 
 believe, had never been disturbed until he, years after 
 the death of the painter and the Countess, found it 
 where the painter had laid it after comparing it for the 
 last time with the colour in the picture of the beautiful 
 Lady Betty. '* Has any lock of hair, I wonder," ex- 
 claims Tom Taylor, "been as carefully preserved in a 
 lover's keeping as this in the painter's ? " One specu- 
 lation fairly leading to another, it may be asked: May 
 the painter in this case not have been a lover? 
 Difficult as it might be to prove that he was, it is 
 more difficult and less delectable to see in him the lover 
 of a woman who held love so cheap as did Angelica 
 KaufFmann. 
 
 It is to^be deplored that no portrait by Sir Joshua of 
 78 
 
The Glasgow Portrait 
 
 Angelica is in any London public gallery. In the 
 Corporation Gallery of Glasgow there is " A Portrait 
 of a Lady " which has been supposititiously identified 
 with the better-known of the two German-named 
 painters — Miss Moser and Miss KaufFmann — who were 
 the first (and last) of their sex to be enrolled members 
 of the Royal Academy of Arts of England, This 
 Glasgow portrait presents a pink-cheeked, pretty lady 
 bedizened with many pearls, ^ 
 
 Among new names in Reynolds's pocket-book for 
 1766 are those of Mr, and Mrs. Thrale, whose acquaint- 
 ance he seems to have made this year, doubtless 
 through Johnson. He was in after-years to paint ad- 
 mired pictures of these munificent patrons of literature 
 and art. 
 
 The pictures in 1766 exhibited by Reynolds — they 
 were four — were predominantly those of men, an un- 
 usual and significant fact. The one portrait _, . 
 of a lady exhibited was that of a society 1 -i • j 
 beauty, Mrs. Hale as Euphrosyne. This ^*«^*»^^« 
 picture is allowed to have been one of the *^ ^' 
 punter's least successful attempts at the "poetical," 
 The three male portraits presented severally the 
 
 ' Other pictures by Reynolds in the Glasgow Corporation Gallery are 
 "The Portrait of a Gentleman" (he is comely and benign-faced, and 
 the picture is very pleasing), " The Portrait of a Boy " (very beautiful, 
 in spite of a. certain Japanesishness about the eyes, the result of the 
 absence of eye-lashes), " The Death of Cleopatra " (presenting Cleo- 
 patra, Charmian, and another woman and the asp "grouped" — a poor 
 thing), " A Portrait of Mrs. Sheridan " (charming). 
 
 79 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 Marquis of Granby, this portrait of whom, represent- 
 ng the popular, bald-pated, kindly-faced general with 
 his arm flung across his charger, was thef picture which 
 has been so often copied; Sir Geoffrey Amherst, in 
 armour, looking the valiant soldier that he was ; and a 
 group of two men of peace, James Paine, the architect, 
 and his son, painted to admiration. 
 
 The sitter-list of the year includes, besides those 
 already named, the noted beauties, the Misses Horneck, 
 painted together, their ages in 1766 being sixteen and 
 fourteen years. Lady Waldegrave, and Kitty Fisher. 
 It includes General Burgoyne, sardonically described as 
 " more favourably known as dramatist than as soldier," 
 Mr. Craunch, the Devonshire gentleman who had been 
 the first to see the Devonshire painter's promise, and 
 — " Mr. Hastings." 
 
 This was Warren Hastings years before his im- 
 peachment, at which Reynolds was present, as Macaulay 
 II n/T points out in his gorgeous description of 
 
 ■ „ what he calls significantly that "spectacle." 
 * " There were seen side by side," he writes, 
 •'the greatest painter and the greatest scholar of the 
 age. The spectacle had allured Reynolds from that 
 easel which has preserved to us the thoughtful fore- 
 heads of so many writers and statesmen, and the sweet 
 smiles of so many noble matrons." 
 
 In 1766, too, Reynolds painted the King's youngest 
 /sister, the Princess Caroline, in that year to become 
 Queen of Denmark. He painted her just before her 
 setting out on her journey to her husband's country— 
 
 80 
 
Nelly O'Brien (p. 58). 
 
Reynolds and the Court 
 
 a journey concerning which she had seemingly the 
 saddest whisperings at heart, for Reynolds has left it 
 on record that he always found her in tears. „, 
 
 It will be remembered that the King married _ . 
 by her became a madman. Reynolds him- 
 self allowed that his picture of her was not 
 good. He could paint — he did afterwards paint — an im- 
 pressive picture of Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse, but 
 he had not the skill to make even a passable picture 
 of a royal lady shedding real tears over her tragic fate 
 divined. His poor picture of the Princess did not, it 
 may safely be assumed, raise him in the estimation of 
 the Court, well satisfied with the best work of painters 
 not the best, but not to be put off with the worst work 
 of the man accounted the best painter of his time. 
 
 Much has been said and written on the subject of 
 Reynolds's unpopularity at the Court. That Ramsay 
 here got the start of him is not matter 
 for surprise. He was an able painter, ppu- 
 
 besides being a Scotsman with a Scots friend -^ 
 
 at Court. It is the preference which was 
 given by Royalty to such painters as Cotes and West 
 over Reynolds that calls for comment. "Like other 
 dull men," says Thackeray, in his account of George III. , 
 " the King was all his life suspicious of superior people. 
 He did not like Fox ; he did not like Reynolds. . . . He 
 loved mediocrities; Benjamin West was his favourite 
 painter." True. And Francis Cotes was high in his 
 favour. That West and Cotes were prime movers in the 
 foundation of the Academy, now an event near at hand, 
 
 8i G 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 had indubitably its influence in bringing round the King, 
 who, having at first eyed the institution unfavourably, 
 was won to extend his approval to it, purse in hand, 
 for he handsomely offered to meet all its money 
 deficiencies from his private means. He also to some 
 extent made amends to Reynolds on the eve of the first 
 exhibition at the Royal Academy. His fellow-painters 
 having by acclamation dubbed him President, the King 
 dubbed him Knight, and, later, accepted the dedication 
 to himself of the discourses on art which Sir Joshua 
 addressed to the Academy students. A day came, 
 moreover, when the post of painter to the King being 
 vacant through the death of Ramsay, Reynolds was 
 appointed to it at the imposing salary of fifty pounds a 
 year. So much for Royalty and Reynolds, who, painter 
 admired and desired as he was by all the kingly men and 
 queenly women of his time, had to sue outright to be 
 allowed to paint the anointed King and Queen of 
 England. That he did so must ever remain a matter 
 of regret to those who would fain see in the man who 
 was the friend of Wilkes and Burke one who man- 
 fully took his stand in politics, cheerfully counting the 
 cost. The case would, however, appear to be other- 
 wise, and Tom Taylor vainly asks some of us to bate 
 our estimate of Reynolds's "political pococurantisra," 
 to give the gentle name given by him to the political 
 attitude taken up by Reynolds. 
 
 Many pictures were sent forth from the Leicester 
 Square studio in 1767, though none were that year sent 
 to the Incorporated Society of Artists, which may 
 
 82 
 
Burke 
 
 perhaps be considered Reynolds's comment on the 
 quarrels of the two parties in that Society. Among 
 his sitters in 1767 were the Lord Chancellor, „.., , 
 the Speaker (Sir John Cust), Lord Temple, J 
 
 Townshend, and Burke. The Speaker had 
 a very short nose, which probably as little pleased 
 Reynolds as the very long nose of Mrs. Siddons 
 pleased Gainsborough, but the short-nosed man found 
 his painter more civil than the long-nosed lady found 
 hers. The Earl with his tell-tale nickname " Squire 
 Gawky" (?".e. Temple), was also made the best of. 
 Unfortunately, the same thing cannot be said of 
 Burke, who sat this year to Reynolds for the first 
 time of many times. AH things are to be forgiven 
 to Reynolds's local patriotism, excepting perhaps 
 that he made of Dr. Mudge of Devonshire so very 
 much finer a picture than he made of Burke, who is 
 very tenably thought to refer in especial to the superb 
 portrait of Dr. Mudge in writing to Barry in 1767 
 that the portraits in the Leicester Square painting- 
 room of that year, in his opinion, surpass any before 
 painted by Reynolds. 
 
 It remains a grievous pity that Reynolds could not 
 see into the great soul of Burke, and that he has not 
 in this case given us a picture worthy of the , 
 
 original. Not that the picture of Burke in Burkes 
 the National Portrait Gallery is without re- Po^t^f^^t 
 deeming features. It is simple and unaffected, and the 
 statesman who was to become indissolubly associated 
 in the popular mind with the small bob-wig which it 
 
 83 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 pleased him to wear perched on his large head wears 
 his own hair in Reynolds's picture. But his eyes are 
 surely far too dull. We cannot guess at the untamed 
 spirit within, though we see the powerful mouth and 
 the nostrils that quivered with indignation at every 
 wrong. We pass on disappointed. It is not the picture 
 of the man whose conversation ih a chance encounter 
 under an archway in a shower of rain would have told 
 you that his was the strongest intellect in Britain. 
 Rather is it merely the picture of a sad-faced man in 
 dress of the dingy hue that Georgians called "sad- 
 coloured." 
 
 There is a very interesting unfinished head, life-size, 
 of Edmund Burke by Sir Joshua Reynolds in Edinburgh, 
 in the National Gallery of Scotland. It is rightly said 
 of it : "It has been left in a state in which Reynolds's 
 manner of commencing a head may be studied with 
 facility, and much useful insight obtained. The firmness 
 and decision with which the features are put in evince 
 the hand of a master." The face, which is very noble, 
 is that of a man dead. It contrasts very favourably 
 with that of another picture by Reynolds in the National 
 Gallery of Scotland. This picture, which is finished — 
 indeed, very much over-finished in the painter's early 
 manner — presents Sir David Lindsay with a face of 
 pallor which justifies the exclamation overheard by the 
 present writer from a person standing in front of 
 this portrait: "That man had pernicious anaemia!" 
 The anaemic Sir David Lindsay is seen at the greater 
 disadvantage at the Edinburgh Gallery from being 
 
 84 
 
Strife among the Artists 
 
 placed close to a very plethoric Lord Newton by Sir 
 Henry Raeburn. 
 
 The beauties, never absent from Reynolds's sitters, 
 included in 1767 Miss Horneck and Nelly 
 O'Brien. Kitty Fisher did not sit to Reynolds The 
 
 that year, though her husband — Mr. Norris Beauties 
 — did. The stage was as usual represented, in i'j6'j 
 Garrick and Mrs. Abington sitting anew. 
 
 It is not established past a doubt that Reynolds in 
 1767 painted La Zamperini, the opera-singer and dancer 
 who in that year was the rage of London in the part of 
 Cecchina, a name entered in the pocket-book list of 
 sitters twice successively in 1767, and by Tom Taylor 
 thought to denote the fifteen-year-old girl of ' ' wicked, 
 wanton, witching look " who acted the character thus 
 entitled. It is fairly certain, however, that Reynolds 
 in 1767 painted Johnson's black servant, and he has 
 himself left it on record that upon one morning of that 
 year he gave a special sitting to the Speaker's Peruke, 
 one followed, perhaps inauspiciously, by the first sitting 
 of Burke. In 1768 Reynolds sent as his last contribution 
 to the annual exhibition of the Incorporated Society of 
 Artists his picture of Miss Cholmondeley. It represents 
 a charming little girl carrying a dog over a brook. 
 
 Affairs in the Incorporated Society this „ ., . 
 year came to a head, a consummation at ^, / 
 which Reynolds, characteristically enough, , 
 
 was absent. He was in Paris, but he re- o • *^ f 
 turned to London in time to enter upon Aft 
 the presidency of the institution to-day 
 
 85 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 known as the Royal Academy, which owed its origin 
 to the steps taken during his absence from England 
 by West, Cotes, and others, who drew up the 
 plan of an Academy, and successfully petitioned 
 the King to adopt it. According to Leslie's full and 
 admirable account of the foundation of 
 I'ounaa- ^^^ Academy, a final report of proceed- 
 twnofthe j^^^ ^^^ ^^^^j^ ^^ ^j^^ j^j^^^^ ^^ Saturday, 
 Academy j^g^gj^ber loth, 1768, and with his sanc- 
 ^^ "' tion the Academy was formally instituted, 
 
 the first general meeting being held four days after- 
 wards. 
 
 Reynolds's comparatively short sitter-list for this 
 year contains the names of the five ladies whose 
 portraits were to be his contribution to the first 
 exhibition held by the Royal Academy. They were 
 the Duchess of Manchester (painted with her son 
 as Diana disarming Cupid), Mrs. Blake (as Juno 
 receiving the cestus from Venus), Miss Morris (as 
 Hope nursing Love), and Mrs. Bouverie painted 
 with her friend Mrs. Crewe. Mrs. Abington, the 
 oft -painted, sat to Reynolds again in 1768, and 
 Lord Rockingham, who had sat to him in 1766, sat 
 a second time to him this year. Among new names 
 in the sitter-list is that of the Solicitor - General, 
 a portrait of whom by Reynolds is to-day to be seen 
 in the National Portrait Gallery in London. N6 John 
 Dunning, son of an attorney at Ashburton in Devon- 
 shire, this famous lawyer, who as presented by 
 Reynolds has an oddly unbeautiful while merry and 
 
 86 
 
Academy Discourse 
 
 keen face, was raised to the peerage as Baron Ash- 
 burton of Ashburton.^ 
 
 The first of the Academy Discourses was delivered 
 somewhat more than a month before the opening of 
 the Academy on the 2nd of January, 1769. 
 In it were enumerated the advantages held 
 to proceed from the institution of a Royal . -^ 
 Academy. Hints were offered to the con- 
 sideration of the professbrs, who were in especial 
 counselled to exact implicit obedience to the rules 
 of art from the young students, in whom "a pre- 
 mature disposition to a masterly dexterity" was to 
 be sternly repressed. The loyalty of the President- 
 to-be, and his appreciation of his brothers in art, found 
 perfervid expression. ' ' We are happy," was announced, 
 "in having a Prince who has conceived the design of 
 such an Institution ; and who promotes the Arts, as the 
 head of a great, a learned, a polite, and a commercial 
 nation. . . . There are, at this time, a greater number 
 of excellent artists than were ever known before at one 
 period in this nation; there is a general desire among 
 our Nobility to be distinguished as lovers and judges of 
 the Arts ; there is a greater superfluity of wealth among 
 the people to reward the professors ; and, above all, we 
 are patronised by a Monarch who, knowing the value 
 of science and of elegance, thinks every art worthy of 
 his notice that tends to soften and humanise the mind." 
 
 ' In the National Portrait Gallery, too, is Reynolds's portrait of 
 Blackstone of "Commentaries" fame. It is a fine picture dried to 
 a chip. 
 
 87 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 By a comical reversal of the anticlimax, the name George 
 THE Third, writ large, closes the first Discourse, the 
 last being closed by the name Michael Angelo, writ 
 large. 
 
 The first exhibition of the Royal Academy was 
 opened on April 26th of this year, five days after the 
 knighting of the President. The names of the pictures 
 sent by Sir Joshua have been recorded, and it only 
 remains to be pointed out that three out of the four were 
 mythological with a staring ineptitude, shown in the 
 painting of a married lady as Diana — the goddess who 
 elected to remain unwed — and of a spinster as Hope 
 nursing Love. A bachelor aged forty-six, as was Sir 
 Joshua in 1769, ought not to have blundered so 
 direfully. 
 
 His duties as President, which naturally weighed 
 heavily in the first year of the Royal Academy, did not 
 ov/ f pi'svent Sir Joshua from painting diligently, 
 J among sitters old and new who sat to him 
 ' " in that year being Mrs. Horton, the widow 
 
 of the yard-long eye-lashes, a Royal Duchess to be ; 
 Mrs. Bouverie, painted for the full-length picture of her 
 tossing her child ; Garrick, Miss Harriet Powell (the 
 actress with a bird on her hand, painted as Leonora 
 in "The Padlock"), Burke, and Angelica Kauffmann. 
 
 On the nth of December of this year was delivered 
 
 the second Discourse. It treated of the 
 
 _,. course and order of study, and of the 
 
 different stages of art. In it much copying 
 
 was discountenanced, and the artist was told that at all 
 
 88 
 
Goldsmith (p. 71), 
 
Retrospect 
 
 times and in all places he should be employed in laying up 
 materials for the exercise of his art. The medallists to 
 whom these Discourses were more particularly addressed 
 — students who had received prizes in the form of silver 
 and gold medals — were thus courteously invited to give 
 the President a hearing : 
 
 ' ' I congratulate you on the honour which you have 
 just received. I have the highest opinion of your 
 merits, and could wish to show my sense of them in 
 something which possibly may be more useful to you 
 than barren praise. I could wish to lead you into such 
 a course of study as may render your future progress 
 answerable to your past improvement ; and whilst I 
 applaud you for what has been done, remind you how 
 much yet remains to attain perfection. 1 flatter myself 
 that from the long experience I have had, and the 
 unceasing assiduity with which I have pursued those 
 studies, in which, like you, I have been engaged, I 
 shall be acquitted of vanity in offering some hints to 
 your consideration." 
 
 Thus was brought to a close a most prosperous 
 decade in the life of Reynolds. At the beginning of it 
 he had moved into Leicester Square, there fixing for 
 good and all his London home ; towards the end 
 of it he bought himself a house on Richmond Hill, 
 commanding, says Tom Taylor, "the beautiful view 
 painted by him of the Twickenham meadows, the placid 
 reaches of the Thames, and the woodland distance 
 bounded by the blue Surrey hills." 
 
 This was when Richmond was in Arcady. 
 89 
 
CHAPTER VII. 
 
 SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS AS TEACHER AND WRITER. 
 
 From his first Continental journey Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 had brought back a pupil — Marchi — and throughout his 
 career he had pupils. At the opening of the Royal 
 Academy he delivered the first of a series of Discourses 
 to the pupils of that institution. He had written three 
 papers on art for the Idler in 1759, and his Academy 
 Discourses were published in 1778. 
 
 These Discourses form a striking part of his work in 
 that decade, and as they represent him at one and the 
 same time as teacher and writer it becomes needful to 
 consider him here in that dual character. 
 
 It is a delicate and difiicult task to clear Sir Joshua 
 
 Reynolds of the charge brought against him of having 
 
 Charge Pleached what he did not practise. While 
 
 , , , he was assiduously cultivating the bland 
 
 . , style, he had for ever on his lips the words 
 against ■' ^ , 
 
 „ ,T "the grand style." Hfe counselled his 
 
 pupils to depict "heroic action or heroic 
 
 suffering," but he himself never depicted either.^ Art 
 
 as he, knowingly, worshipped her was not the high 
 
 ' The " Ugolino" picture, as now generally estimated, can hardly be 
 considered as giving denial to this statement. Of it hereafter. 
 
 90 
 
Charge of Insincerity 
 
 priestess who had the homage of Michael Angelo, but a 
 Georgian lady "townish" and (in another word of the 
 town of that time) "tonish," whose mandate, to the 
 uttermost obeyed by him, was that he should paint 
 even as he did paint, 
 
 " And thus to tonish folk present 
 The Picturesque of Sentiment." 
 
 While doing that he lost no opportunity of extolling the 
 works and ways of Michael Angelo, in especial doing 
 this in his annual discourses delivered to the students of 
 the Royal Academy. The thing might be explained as 
 a salve to his conscience, but that it is by no means 
 generally allowed that Sir Joshua Reynolds had a con- 
 science. His silence in one direction is held to belie the 
 idea. "From the works of Leonardo da Vinci, Fra 
 Bartolommeo, Titian and Velasquez," says one of his 
 biographers, "he acquired knowledge which placed 
 fortune and fame within his reach ; yet of these artists 
 he says little, though he acknowledges the portrait of 
 \Innocent the Tenth' by the last-named of them to be 
 the finest in the world." 
 
 The man who thus writes of Reynolds less mercilessly 
 exposes him than Reynolds exposes himself in a pas- 
 sage which shows him as regards the attitude 
 
 assumed by him towards the old masters to . , . 
 u u • 1- J7 L fnves hvm- 
 
 have been a young smner before he was an * 
 
 old sinner. In an account which he himself ^ -^ 
 
 has left of his sensations on first seeing the paintings 
 
 of Raphael in the Vatican at the age of twenty-three 
 
 91 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 years, he states that they wofuUy disappointed him, 
 adding — "I viewed them again and again; I even 
 aflfected to feel their merit and admire them more than 
 I really did." It was a bad beginning. 
 
 Of course he sets about justifying himself. " In a 
 short time," he says, "a new taste and a new percep- 
 f, , - . . tion began to dawn upon me, and I was 
 Jj'J^^ *■ convinced that I had originally formed a 
 /ica n false opinion of the perfection of art, and 
 that this great master was still entitled to the high 
 rank which he holds in the admiration of the world." 
 Altogether he makes out a case for himself, 
 ^■y and, the case against him having been fully 
 
 ■^ stated here, it is only just that his defence 
 
 of himself should not be withheld. 
 
 In the first of his Discourses he speaks of " that 
 ideal excellence which it is the lot of genius always 
 to contemplate and never to attain." In the second 
 he says, "Few have been taught to any purpose who 
 have not been their own teachers," adding whimsically, 
 ' ' We prefer those instructions which we have given 
 ourselves, from our affection to the instructor." In 
 this Discourse, too, he draws a fancy picture of a 
 promising young painter who does not limit his studies 
 to those of pictures. "I cannot help imagining," he 
 says, " that' I see a promising young painter, equally 
 vigilant, whether at home or abroad, in the streets or 
 in the fields. Every object that presents itself to him 
 is a lesson. He regards all nature with a view to his 
 profession, and combines her beauties or corrects her 
 
 92 
 
Reynolds and Correggio 
 
 defects. He examines the countenance of men under the 
 influence of passion; and often catches the most pleas- 
 ing hints from subjects of turbulence and deformity. " 
 
 In the third Discourse will be found what follows: 
 "A man is not weak though he may not be able to 
 wield the club of Hercules, nor does a man always 
 practise that which he esteems the best, but does that 
 which he can best do." No better answer than that 
 can be given to those who taunt this man dead — as 
 there were those who taunted him living — with not 
 practising what he preached. 
 
 A fact rather unaccountably under-estimated is that 
 Reynolds did, moreover, himself largely acquire through 
 the study of paintings knowledge whidi it might, be 
 imagined he would have acquired from gazing at the 
 life. He has himself left it on record that he con- 
 sidered the possession of portraits by Titian, Vandyke, 
 Rembrandt, and other old masters as the best kind of 
 wealth, adding that the contemplation of 
 them teaches later men to think in their _ 
 way and sometimes to attain their excel- 
 lence. " If I had never," he continues, "seen any of 
 the works of Correggio, I should never perhaps have 
 remarked in nature the expression which I find in one 
 of his pieces." This passage might have inspired the 
 words which Browning puts into the lips of Fra Lippo 
 Lippi — 
 
 "... don't you mark ? we're made so that we love 
 First when we see them painted, things we have passed 
 Perhaps a thousand times nor cared to see . . ." 
 
 93 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 All are not made so, but perhaps Fra Lippo Lippi — 
 and, obviously, Sir Joshua Reynolds — was so made. 
 It has been unfortunate for his good name that he 
 taught at all; for his censors have mainly concerned 
 themselves with him as teacher, and the fewest of them 
 have mingled praise with blame, as did Raskin when 
 he wrote: "Nearly every word that Reynolds wrote 
 was contrary to his own practice; he seems to have 
 been born to teach all error by his precept and all 
 excellence by his example." Sweet St. Charity herself 
 might have inspired those words. 
 
 That Reynolds not only took up his position as a 
 teacher, but ardently courted distinction as a writer, is 
 . undeniable, and it might not be undemon- 
 
 strable that at heart he preferred letters to 
 art. The Royal Academy was not founded 
 by him, but he was the founder of the 
 Literary Club. He is not known to have signally 
 befriended painters, but he gave the poet Crabbe his 
 first "lift." He loved the society of writers, — they 
 were his only friends; he loved reading, — who does not 
 know how he read the Life of Savage ? he loved contri- 
 buting to literature, — he sat up all night writing for the 
 Idler. It pleased him to be associated with Johnson as 
 an annotator of Shakespeare, and he must needs write 
 on art as well as practise it. As a child he had read The 
 Jesuits Perspective and Richardson's Treatise on Paint- 
 ing; as a man he commended Mason's translation of Du 
 ¥resnoy's Art of Painting, and advanced it in the public 
 estimation by the- illustrative notes which he added to it. 
 
 94 
 
The Discourses Censured 
 
 His well-known Discourses, which are a classic in the 
 literature of art, were delivered at the annual medal- 
 distributions among the students of the Royal . . 
 Academy, and one mandate in them has been n^n 
 said to give the character of them in their "■' 
 entirety. It is this: "Study the great '^"'^''^"^* 
 works of the great masters for ever." It being con- 
 ceded that Reynolds does somewhat harp on that string, 
 it is only just to say that the Discourses have other 
 aspects, some censurable and some highly praiseworthy. 
 To deal first with the censurable; the heckler has here 
 a fine subject for his skill. The phrasing is often 
 distressingly inelegant, as when the writer makes dis- 
 tinction of "the more -prinei^M " and "the most 
 perfect " ; it isoften pleonastic, as in the sentence, 
 "This appears to me a very tedious, and, I think, a 
 very erroneous method of proceeding." It abounds in 
 faults of grammar. Thus Reynolds writes of poetry 
 and painting: "The object of both is to accommodate 
 itself to all the natural propensities and inclinations of 
 the mind." He knows Latin, but he does not know 
 how to translate good Latin into good English, or we 
 should not come upon what follows in the Tenth 
 Discourse: "Causa latet, res est notissima; without 
 any perplexing inquiry, the effect is hourly perceived." 
 He is the less to be forgiven this lame Englishing of a 
 classic maxim that he brings sharp criticism to bear on 
 Hobbes's translation of Homer, parts of which, he says, , 
 are "remembered and repeated merely for the familiarity 
 and meanness of their phraseology." A collection of 
 
 95 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 sayings from his Discourses, made almost at random by 
 the present writer, will show a familiarity and meanness 
 of phraseology coupled with a philosophy having the 
 like familiarity and meanness. It is the philosophy of 
 Chesterfield expressed in copy-book head-lines that cry 
 for transcription, in immoral dicta masquerading as 
 moral, in wisdom of every sort but the sweet and the 
 sound, the lovely and the pleasant. Let the reader 
 judge :— 
 
 " Nothing is denied to well-directed labour." 
 
 " Labour is the only price of solid fame.'' 
 
 " What has been soon done has been as soon forgotten.'' 
 
 " Enthusiastic admiration seldom promotes knowledge."^ 
 
 " By reading the thoughts of others we learn to think." 
 
 " What may heighten the elegant may degrade the sublime." 
 
 " The history of errors, properly managed, often shortens the 
 
 road to truth." 
 
 " It may be laid down as a maxim, that he who begins by 
 
 presuming on his own sense, has ended his studies as soon as 
 
 he has commenced them." 
 " He can never be a great artist who is grossly illiterate." 
 " The business of a great painter is to paint a great picture." 
 
 " Be as select in those whom you endeavour to please, as in 
 those whom you endeavour to imitate." 
 
 " Peculiarities in the works of art are like those in the human 
 
 ' This is the dictum which so greatly roused the ire of Blake, to 
 whom Reynolds was an artist "hired by Satan for the depression of 
 art." 
 
 96 
 
Angelica Kauffmann (p. 73). 
 
The Poetical Manner 
 
 figure ; it is by them that we are cognisable and distinguished 
 one from another, but they are always so many blemishes." 
 
 " The faults and defects in some men seem to become them 
 when they appear to be ihe natural growth, and of a piece with 
 the rest of their character." 
 
 " Love of method is often love of idleness." 
 
 " We never are satisfied with our opinions, whatever we may 
 pretend, till they are ratified and confirmed by the rest of 
 mankind." 
 
 There is much of Polonius in all that, the truth being' 
 
 that there was much of Polonius in Sir Joshua Reynolds. 
 
 In the naming of his contemporaries the pictures of 
 
 Reynolds fall into three divisions, the his- p. ^ z. 
 
 ... , ... , Sir Joshua 
 
 torical pictures, the poetical pictures, and ,, 
 
 the portraits. In the following passage, ,,p .■ ,„ 
 contained in the Fourth Discourse, he ex- 
 presses himself on the subject of the " Poetical ": — 
 
 " How much the great style exacts from its pro- 
 fessors to conceive and represent their subjects in a 
 poetical manner, not confined to mere matter of fact, 
 may be seen in the Cartoons of Raffaelle. In all the 
 pictures in which the painter has represented the 
 apostles, he has drawn them with great nobleness ; he 
 has given them as much dignity as the human figure 
 is capable of receiving ; yet we are expressly told in 
 Scripture that they had no such respectable appearance; 
 and of St. Paul, in particular, we are told, by himself, 
 that his bodily presence was mean. Alexaojder is said 
 to have been of a low stature : a painter ought not so 
 
 97 H 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 to represent him. Agesilaus was low, lame, and of a 
 mean appearance : none of these defects ought to 
 appear in a piece of which he is the hero. In con- 
 formity to custom, I call this part of the art History 
 Painting ; it ought to be called Poetical, as in reality it 
 is. All this is not falsifying any fact ; it is taking an 
 allowed poetical license." 
 
 That passage, viewed alone, is striking, and it 
 becomes much more striking viewed in connection with 
 the pictures of Reynolds classed as "poetical." Some 
 of the most admired of these are named in "The 
 Shepherd Boy," " Muscipula," "The Strawberry Girl," 
 " The Sleeping Girl," the " Boy Hearkening to a Mar- 
 vellous Story," and "The Fortune-Teller." Mytho- 
 logical subjects especially commended theinselves to 
 Reynolds in his "poetical" moods, hence his "Thais," 
 his "Dido," his "Cymon and Iphigenia," his "Mer- 
 cury," and his "Venus" ("chiding Cupid for casting 
 accounts"). The poetical fit was strong upon him 
 when he painted ' ' The Infant Hercules Strangling the 
 Serpents " for the Empress Catharine of Russia. Ten 
 pictures were under this one, he said. The one atop 
 represented a fat little boy doing murder upon two 
 snakes. The Empress was to see in this performance a 
 subtly conceived presentment of her own achievements. 
 As she had not an acute sense of the ridiculous she 
 was not displeased, and the painter was munificently 
 rewarded. 
 
 An admired compromise between the "poetical" 
 picture and the portrait was achieved by Sir Joshua 
 
 98 
 
Refined Expression 
 
 Reynolds in those portraits in which there is mytho- 
 logising and allegorising, most of them portraits of 
 women, for men, it seems, did not in Ws eyes so readily 
 lend themselves to this treatment, howbeit he painted 
 "poetical" portraits of Garrick and Beattie, 
 
 It is perhaps best to place with the poetical pictures 
 those in which are supplied illustrations to poetry, as in 
 the "Ugolino" and in the contributions to the "Shake- 
 speare Gallery," and with this class of pictures may 
 perhaps also be named those having a religious subject. 
 These works are of varying merit, but not one of them 
 remotely suggests that the painter has modelled his style 
 on that of the Cartoons of Raphael cited by him as in- 
 structing "professors of the great style" (and who more 
 than he belonged to "professors" of it?) to conceive 
 and represent their subjects in a poetical manner. 
 
 Enough of blame. 
 
 In connection with the " Laocoon" Reynolds says in 
 his Discourses: — " It has been observed in a late pub- 
 lication that if the attention of the father in „ u 
 , . , , , . , , , Reynolds 
 
 this group had been occupied more by the ^ ,, 
 
 distress of his children than by his own ,,t „ 
 
 „ . . i , , . % , "Laocoon 
 
 suffering^, it would have raised a much 
 
 greater interest in the spectator. Though this observa- 
 tion comes from a person whose opinion, in everything 
 relating to the Arts, carries with it the highest authority, 
 yet I cannot but suspect that such refined expression is 
 scarce within the province of this Art ; and in attempting 
 it the Artist will run great risk of enfeebling expression, 
 and making it less intelligible to the spectator." 
 
 99 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 This passage is of great significance in connection 
 with Reynolds's own presentment of "Ugolino," whose 
 
 face some have found soulless. The essence 
 " Ug^olmo" of the statement regarding the "Laocoon" 
 
 is reproduced by Browning in " Count Gis- 
 mond," in words in which he makes a woman say: — 
 
 " What says the body when they spring 
 Some monstrous torture-engine's whole 
 Strength on it ? No more says the soul." 
 
 It is not necessary to agree with Reynolds and 
 Browning in the foregoing assertion, but it is of interest 
 to find Reynolds anticipating Browning at his most 
 realistic. In like manner he anticipates Wordsworth at 
 his most idealistic in writing of ' ' the beauty of which 
 we are in quest" — "it is an idea that subsists only in 
 the mind ; the sight never beheld it, nor has the hand 
 expressed it. ..." In a mood less visionary Reynolds 
 asserts that beauty and nature are the same thing, 
 "Deformity," he adds, "is not nature, but an acci- 
 dental deviation from her accustomed practice." Simi- 
 larly, in a paper contributed to the Idler ten years 
 before he had used the phrase, ' ' the most beautiful, 
 that is, the most general form of nature." 
 
 The impressionist school of art to-day will none of 
 Reynolds, yet he had the start in what is best in the 
 teaching of this school. " I remember," said he 
 (Eleventh Discourse), "a landscape-painter in Rome, 
 who was known by the name of Studio, from his 
 
 ICO 
 
Imitation 
 
 patience and high finishing, in which he thought the 
 whole, excellence of art consisted; so that he once 
 endeavoured, as he said, to represent every 
 individual leaf on a tree. This picture I . f" 
 
 never saw; but I am very sure that an P^^^^" 
 artist who looked only at the general ^'^^°^ '^^^ 
 character of the species, the order of the ^-^^^ 
 branches, and the masses of the foliage, would in a 
 few minutes produce a more true resemblance of 
 trees than this painter in as many months."^ 
 
 Reynolds does not preach the servile imitation which 
 he has been charged with preaching. In speaking of 
 the great masters, "Instead of treading in r, ij 
 their footsteps," said he, "endeavour only ^-^^^ 
 to keep the same road." Again he said: . "'!* 
 
 " It is a necessary and warrantable pride to 
 disdain to walk servilely behind any individual, however 
 elevated his rank. The true and liberal ground of 
 imitation is an open field; where, though he who pre- 
 cedes has had the advantage of starting before you, 
 you may always propose to overtake him ; it is enough, 
 however, to pursue his course; you need not tread in 
 his footsteps, and you certainly have a right to outstrip 
 him if you can." In the same Discourse Reynolds said: 
 " He that follows must necessarily be behind," 
 
 He always railed at affectation, in one Discourse 
 naming it "the most hateful of all hateful qualities." 
 He allowed himself to have his gird at "the vulgar and 
 
 ■^ For a reference to Reynolds anticipatory at his most remarkable 
 (that is to say, anticipatory of Maeterlinclc), see here Chapter X., p. i jo. 
 
 lOl 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 ignorant who feel the highest satisfaction in seeing 
 a figure, which, they say, looks as if you could walk 
 round it." He condemned indiscriminate 
 eyno homage, even when given to painters of the 
 
 enun- excellence of Michael Angelo, Poussin, Rem- 
 cm ory brandt, Correggio, and Rubens, severally 
 named in this connection by him. They have their de- 
 fects, he asserted (and he named ,them), and under this 
 aspect " have a right to our pardon, but not to our 
 admiration." 
 
 He had read Bacon on proportion and beauty, and 
 questioned his view, though doing so most diffidently, 
 in respect to "so great a writer." 
 
 The best in English poetry as the best in English 
 prose was known to him, and he drew freely upon his 
 knowledge here to illustrate his Discourses. "The 
 most ornamental style," said he, "requires repose to 
 set off even its ornaments to advantage. I cannot 
 avoid mentioning here an instance of repose, in that 
 faithful and accurate painter of nature, Shakespeare — 
 the short dialogue between Duncan and Banquo, whilst 
 they are approaching the gates of Macbeth's castle. 
 Their conversation very naturally turns upon the beauty 
 of its situation, and the pleasantness of the air^ and 
 Banquo, observing the martlets' nests in every recess 
 of the cornice, remarks that where those bitds most 
 breed and haunt the air is delicate. The subject of this 
 quiet and easy conversation gives that repose so neces- 
 sary to the mind, after the tumultuous bustle of the 
 preceding scenes, and perfectly contrasts the scene of 
 
 I02 
 
Milton 
 
 horror that immediately succeeds." That passage 
 amply justifies Johnson in inviting Reynolds to add 
 to the notes of his Shakespeare. 
 
 Milton (in the Eighth Discourse) is instanced as 
 justifying "general ideas expressed in sketches," 
 though a warning word to painters is added. " A great 
 part of the beauty of the celebrated description of Eve 
 in Paradise Lost" they are told, " consists in using only 
 general indistinct expressions, every reader making out 
 the detail according to his own particular imagination — 
 his own idea of beauty, grace, expression, dignity, or 
 loveliness ; but a painter, when he represents Eve on a 
 canvas, is obliged to give a determined form, and his 
 own idea of beauty distinctly expressed." 
 
 Later art gives negation to Sir Joshua's demurrer. 
 It is not the least interesting feature of his Discourses 
 that the reader of them is for ever set thinking of later 
 art in connection with them. 
 
 103 
 
CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 portraits of the early 'seventies: 
 "lady cockburn and her children," and others. 
 
 The year 1770 was one of great political excitement, 
 which in London went to the cry of " Wilkes and 
 Liberty!" In it took place the resignation of the 
 Grafton Administration, w^iich included many of the 
 friends of Reynolds. The authorship of "Junius" was 
 the question of the hour, and, though three of the 
 men on whom the daring letters were fathered, Barrd, 
 Burke, and Shelburne, had in their day sat to Reynolds, 
 it was now no time for politicians to sit for their 
 portraits, but the Lady Mayoress of London, who 
 was the wife of one of the foremost of them — 
 Beckford's Beckfordian successor, Trecothick — sat to 
 Reynolds. 
 
 The " Ugolino" was begun this year, an Irish beggar- 
 man sitting for the Dantean Count who met his death 
 ..^T .. ..in the Tower of Hunger. Two heads popu- 
 * larly regarded as studies for Ugolino are in 
 
 the National Gallery in London. They are strikingly 
 dissimilar. One is named "The Banished Lord," and 
 a visitor to the Gallery unlearned in the history of 
 Sir Joshua Reynolds's pictures might comprehensibly 
 
 104 
 
Strawberry Girl (p. hq). 
 
"Ugolino" 
 
 wonder at its name, for the sad person presented has 
 nothing lordly in his aspect, the painting of him being 
 rather a very convincing picture of a "poor man." 
 That a picture named "The Banished Lord," and very 
 probably a study for the Italian nobleman who died 
 of starvation, should have this character sufficiently 
 denotes the inability of Reynolds to compete with Dante 
 in the presentment of the tragic. It was to be shown 
 that Sir Joshua was fully capable of portraying mimic 
 tragedy as it commended itself to the visitors of Old 
 Drury — this he did in his " Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic 
 Muse" — but tragedy other than that he was by tem- 
 perament totally unfitted to body forth. Not only is 
 the head of Ugolino, in spite of many studies made for 
 it, essentially unsatisfactory, but the whole picture as 
 eventually painted fails to rouse more than the most 
 languid feelings in persons not formed in the mould of 
 Captain Cook's Omiah, whom the picture of "Ugolino" 
 is said to have affected so much that he imagined it 
 a scene of real distress, and ran to support the expiring 
 child. 
 
 Not alone is it the general opinion of those who 
 bring unprejudiced judgment to bear on the work of 
 Reynolds that the picture of "Ugolino" misses being 
 affecting, owing in prime measure to the lack of ability 
 on the part of the painter to represent the anguish of 
 the father, but it is felt that the children are among 
 the weakest of his productions. "It is true," says an 
 eulogist of the children painted by Reynolds, "that 
 they are all children of condition." This is true of the 
 
 105 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 children painted well. In " Ugolino," however, and 
 in a few other pictures, Reynolds attempted to paint 
 children who were not [curiosa felicitas/) "children of 
 condition," and the result was disastrous. 
 
 It should go without saying that the very qualities 
 which have caused "Ugolino" to fall in estimation to-day 
 — prime among them perhaps its dead coldness — made 
 it in the eighteenth century bespeak high admiration. 
 Thus Horace Walpole, in his Anecdotes of Painting, in 
 asserting that the Italy of Sir Joshua Reynolds's time 
 had not a single painter who could "pretend to rival 
 an imagination so fertile," adds, "In what age were 
 paternal despair and the horrors of death pronounced 
 with more expressive accents than in his picture of 
 Count Ugolino?" That picture touched the highest 
 point of imagination conceivable to the author of the 
 Castle of Otranto, and readers of that Gothic romance — 
 and all who then read were readers of it — admired 
 "Ugolino." 
 
 In the many Englishmen of note who died in 1770 
 Reynolds lost good friends, among them Granby, Lord 
 Ligonier, and Sir John Cust. It would, however, be 
 false to say that his cheerfulness was appreciably 
 impaired by either death's doings among his con- 
 temporaries or the political stress of the time. He was 
 much in society, at balls and masquerades, a gay 
 bachelor in his own way, a temperate, elderly one, for 
 he was now close upon fifty years of age and of known 
 temperance except in the matter of snufF, which he took 
 to excess. 
 
 106 
 
Compliance of Reynolds 
 
 To the Royal Academy of 1770 Sir Joshua sent eight 
 
 pictures, among them "The Children in the Wood." 
 
 These children were painted by him in two _ , ., . 
 
 . . . 1- • J • J J Exhibtts, 
 
 pictures, m one livmg and m one dead, or, 
 
 rather, asleep. Perhaps Sir Joshua did not ^''° 
 
 want to paint them dead, his wish falling in with his 
 capacity, by that happy equipoise which ruled in most 
 things with him. A story current of this picture illus- 
 trates the happy knack which was in a marked degree 
 his, of turning his sitters to the best account. He was, 
 it is said, painting a baby who, falling asleep, was used 
 as a model for a sleeping babe, and, turning in its sleep, 
 presented the idea of another sleeper, the picture which 
 resulted being "The Children in the Wood." 
 
 That story is one of many similar. Thus it is said 
 that a nobleman who in the course of being painted 
 shifted his position from full face to profile was, with- 
 out protest, painted in profile, with advantage, as sub- 
 sequently appeared, to the picture. Similarly, a lady 
 desiring that her head-dress in a picture should be 
 changed to meet a change in fashion following upon 
 completion and exhibition of the picture, had her wish 
 fulfilled, and the portrait with the alteration made in it 
 to meet her wish is appreciably lovelier than the first 
 picture.^ 
 
 ' See Mr. Graves's " Note on Sir Joshua Reynolds," contributed to 
 the Connoisseur for October 1901, in which are given two illustrations 
 showing the original composition and the alterations afterwards 
 effected in the picture in question — a portrait of Mary Amelia, Countess 
 of Salisbury. 
 
 107 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 To the Exhibition of 1770 was sent also the picture 
 of Miss Price as a little shepherdess, referred to ten 
 years later by Horace Walpole in his Anecdotes of 
 Painting, where he asks: "When was infantine love- 
 liness touched with sweeter truth ? " 
 
 Mary Moser's critique on the Royal Academy Exhi- 
 bition of 1770, sent in a letter to Fuseli at Rome, 
 contains the following crescendo, to be enjoyed but not 
 without discretion: — "Reynolds was like himself in 
 pictures which you have seen ; Gainsborough beyond 
 himself in a portrait of a gentleman in a Vandyke 
 habit; and Zoffany superior to everybody in a portrait 
 of Garrick." 
 
 Reynolds's eight exhibition pictures had included 
 three portraits of writers, one of them the masterly 
 portrait of Goldsmith, whose " Deserted Village," dedi- 
 cated to Reynolds, appeared just before the Academy 
 Exhibition was closed. 
 
 In conformity with Sir Joshua's condition of his 
 acceptance of the Presidentship — that he should be 
 n , y allowed to paint the King and Queen — he 
 ,^. was this year allowed to paint George III. 
 
 \, and his consort, and for a part of the year 
 
 f~. busied himself with this work. So says 
 
 Tom Taylor, and adds: "It is a curious 
 circumstance that on the 2nd of August he 
 has a sitting from the Lady Mayoress, Mrs. Trecothick, 
 at one, and leaves her to attend the King at Bucking- 
 ham House. Trecothick was at this time in flagrant 
 opposition." 
 
 108 
 
George III. and Reynolds 
 
 It is not at all improbable that George III. took the 
 human measure of Reynolds with absolute accuracy. 
 The painter was transparently adjustable, and the vision 
 of George III. was sufficiently healthy for him to see 
 through the transparent. As prince he had favoured the 
 arts — it was part of his opposition to his grandfather — ■ 
 and Sir Joshua Reynolds, as President of the Academy 
 taking its name of "Royal" froiji him, and called by 
 him "my own Academy," would undoubtedly have 
 enjoyed his full favour, had he not, as is the way with 
 men of his intellectual equipment, confounded the man 
 with the artist. As it was, though the King did not 
 hide the fact that he had little liking for Sir Joshua, he 
 dutifully looked at his pictures, and in doing so in 
 one case illustrated the phenomenon that a blockhead 
 may outwit a sage on a given occasion. Among the 
 four pictures sent by Sir Joshua to the first exhibition 
 of the Royal Academy was, as has been pointed out 
 here on a prior page, the portrait of Mrs. Crewe and 
 Mrs. Bouverie. In this picture is a tomb inscribed Ei 
 In' Arcadia Ego. 
 
 " When the exhibition was arranging," writes Tom 
 Taylor, "the members and their friends looked the 
 works over. 'What can this mean?' said Dr. Johnson. 
 ' It seems very nonsensical — I am in Arcadia.' 'Well, 
 what of that? The King could have told you,' replied 
 the painter; ' he saw it yesterday, and said at once. Oh, 
 there is a tombstone in the background. Ay, ay, 
 Death is even in Arcadia.' " 
 
 It was a comment on the obvious, but it has its 
 109 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 value when compared with one in which the obvious was 
 so astoundingly overlooked as in the comment made 
 by Dr, Johnson. 
 
 Reynolds had taken the tombstone-touch from a 
 classical painter, and it rendered his picture in so far 
 pseudo-classical. The King loved the pseudo-classical 
 in art, and though West dealt more in it than Reynolds 
 whence, it is thought, his preference for West — 
 Reynolds dealt sufficiently in it to have won his 
 admiration had a personal feeling not intervened. 
 
 The pleasures of town were varied by Sir Joshua 
 Reynolds with the sports and pastimes of the country, 
 and he was young enough and fresh enough 
 in 1770 to be out hunting in Devonshire 
 at seven o'clock one September morning. From 
 his native county he brought back to London his pretty 
 thirteen-year-old niece, "Offy" Palmer, who had lately 
 lost her father, and by whom he acted the part of a 
 father till her marriage. 
 
 In the election of Associates of the Royal Academy 
 
 which took place in 1770, the painter Antonio Zucchi, 
 
 who afterwards married Angelica Kauflfmann, was one 
 
 of those who benefited, and among those who carried 
 
 off medals at this year's distribution of prizes was John 
 
 . Flaxman. Sir Joshua upon this occasion 
 
 „ . delivered his Third Discourse, treating of the 
 
 ' great leadmg principles of the grand style, 
 
 ^' of beauty, and of the genuine habits of 
 
 ' ' nature as distinguished from those of fashion. 
 
 "The painter must," he said, "divest himself of all 
 
 no 
 
Romney 
 
 prejudices in favour of his age or country ; he must 
 disregard all local and temporary ornaments, and look 
 only on those general habits which are everywhere and 
 always the same ; he addresses his works to the people 
 of every country and every age, he calls upon posterity to 
 be his spectators, and says with Zeuxis, In cetemitatem 
 pingo." 
 
 With a glance at the sitter-list of 1770 may be closed 
 the review of Reynolds's work of that year. In it are 
 rung the changes on " Beggar Child " and ^.,, ,. , 
 "Beggar"; it contains the paradoxical , 
 
 sequence, " Lady Mayoress, the King " ; J fi 
 Lady Waldegrave is one of the many lady-sitters ; and 
 a child sits to Sir Joshua for " St, John the Baptist 
 in the Wilderness," presented in the picture to be seen 
 to-day in the Wallace Collection as a large-eyed, open- 
 mouthed boy with wind-blown hair. He is very pretty, 
 but he lacks a halo in every sense. 
 
 A decrease of sitters marks the year 1771, which 
 has been diversely attributed to the growing favour 
 accorded to Romney and to the political 
 events of the time and Reynolds's connection ^ 
 
 with the Opposition. The explanation of it which 
 connects it with Romney carries best weight, it being 
 matter of common knowledge at the time that Reynolds 
 was not only painting the King and Queen at the same 
 time as Alderman Baker and Mrs. Trecothick, but that 
 he was, as one of his biographers puts it, dining with 
 Lord Palmerston of the Admiralty and Lord Pembroke 
 of the Bedchamber in the same year as with Wilkes 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 the demagogue and Burke the Opposition orator. His 
 contemporaries could not well have considered him a 
 man whose political bias was to be taken into account, 
 and if they temporarily swerved in their allegiance to 
 him as painter, it was because another painter had their 
 homage. 
 
 The Academy was installed at Somerset House in 
 
 1 77 1, and the opening ceremonial was graced — so* to 
 
 term it — by the Duke of Cumberland, to- 
 
 ca my ^ards whom, in deep disfavour as he was 
 
 ^ owing to a scandalous intrigue, Sir Joshua 
 
 Reynolds showed exemplary forbearance. 
 House .pjjg ^^^ jj^^ j^^^j^ ^f jjjg ^jjj^g ^jjjg yg^^ 
 
 It was a battle-field into which he carried the white 
 flag. "We never," so we are told, "hear of any 
 cloud or coldness between Sir Joshua and any other 
 member of the Club, like those which gathered in 
 turn between Johnson and Garrick, Johnson and 
 Warton, Johnson and Burke, Goldsmith and Garrick, 
 Garrick and Colman." 
 
 In this year of comparatively few sitters, Reynolds 
 was much at work, it is stated, upon fancy pictures 
 having boy-subjects, such as his picture of Cupid as 
 a link-boy. Beggar-boys sat much to him, and in 
 177 1 he exhibited for the first time the head of 
 ' White the beggar-man. But his sitters of this year 
 were not only beggar-boys and the beggar-man. In 
 1 77 1 he painted what is considered his best portrait 
 of Mrs. Abington, and an actress fair and frail was 
 painted by Sir Joshua this year in Mrs. Baddeley, who 
 
Dr. Johnson (p. 46). 
 
Dinners 
 
 made so merry a beginning and so sad an end. Lady 
 
 Waldegrave, now the Duchess of Gloucester, though 
 
 the public knew it not, sat to Sir Joshua in 1771, and 
 
 the Irish adventuress, lovely loving Polly Kennedy, 
 
 sat to him that year, memorable in her history as the 
 
 one in which she saved her brothers from the gallows. 
 
 Dinners at which Sir Joshua was a guest, and those 
 
 at which he was the host, were numerous this year, 
 
 in which he presided over the first annual 
 
 Fvyst 
 dmner of the Royal Academy, which in- 
 
 eluded, by a diverting anomaly, among other -^ 
 
 Royal Academicians, Goldsmith and John- „ . -^ 
 son, and included among distinguished 
 guests Horace Walpole. The talk was (probably by 
 the discreet ordering of the President) of literature 
 rather than of art. Johnson learned with a shock that 
 the Rowley poems had the admiration of Goldsmith, 
 and Walpole learned with a shock that the author of 
 the Rowley poems had committed suicide. 
 
 The Academy Exhibition of the year contained 
 six pictures by the President. They were severally, 
 " Venus chiding Cupid for Casting Ac- 
 counts," "A Nymph and Bacchus," "A^'^^'f^-^ 
 Girl Reading," "An Old Man," "A ^o^.Exhibttion, 
 trait of a Gentleman," "A Portrait of Mrs. '^^^'^ 
 
 Abington." The picture of Venus and Cupid was a 
 mythological humoresque — a species of humoresque 
 characteristically Reynoldsesque ; the Bacchus was 
 (and still is) a babe alive and kicking; the "Old 
 Man " was a study of the beggar who was sitting for 
 
 113 I 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 " Ugolino," and the " Girl Reading" was the painter's 
 young niece, brought to town by him. Sir Joshua was 
 exceedingly fond of her, and, according to one account, 
 the tea.-and-cofFee rhyme generally attributed to Samuel 
 Reynolds was the production of his son, and, complete, 
 runs : — 
 
 " When I drink tea, 
 
 I think of my ' The ' ; 
 When I drink coffee, 
 
 I think of my Offy, 
 So whether I drink my tea or my coffee, 
 I always think of thee, my Theoffy ! " 
 
 The rhyme may possibly belong to both Samuel and 
 Joshua Reynolds, the latter having added to the pro- 
 duction of the former. The young Offy whom her 
 uncle loved so well is painted by him reading Clarissa 
 Harlowe. 
 
 The year r77i brought James Northcote to London, 
 He came from Devon to try his luck in the capital, and 
 he came to stay. Like another James he shadowed a 
 greater man than himself, and became his biographer. 
 To that James he stands undeniably in the relation of 
 a lesser James. 
 
 Now here, now there, as his way was throughout 
 his busy life of work and play. Sir Joshua in this year 
 attended the installation of the Knights of the Garter 
 at Windsor. He did so by royal command, and, 
 whether or not he had counted the cost of the thing- 
 it turned out to be in his case the loss in the crowd 
 
 114 
 
Mrs. Yates 
 
 of a laced hat and gold watch — he bore it with his 
 customary serenity. 
 
 A visit to Paris, where he found Walpole and 
 Mrs. Abington, enlivened the beginning of autumn. 
 Mrs. Abington had sat to him in March ; 
 Mrs. Baddeley sat to him in June, Mrs. ^'^^^^^^^^ 
 Hartley in July, and Mrs. Yates was to sit to him 
 on his return to London. Mrs. Hartley was the ac- 
 tress who, in the Georgian 'seventies, turned all heads 
 in London with her beauty, and Mrs. Yates was the 
 celebrated tragedian. In a tragedy attended by Sir 
 Joshua Reynolds she had "drowned the pit," in spite 
 of her fault of "too much tottering about and too 
 much flumping down," noted by Kitty Clive. Mrs. 
 Yates had her own conception of the demeanour that 
 befitted one who set up to be the Melpomene of her 
 day. She and Garrick, in 1772, sat to Reynolds. 
 Garrick chattered ; not so she. She sat silent, book 
 in hand, under a bust of Shakespeare, and the art 
 that can immortalise has immortalised her thus. 
 
 In December of 1771 Reynolds delivered his Fourth 
 
 Discourse to the students of the Royal Academy. It 
 
 treated principally of "two distinct styles in 
 
 history-painting, the grand and the orna- . 
 
 mental" — otherwise the Roman and Vene- _. ' 
 
 jjcc 10 
 tian. With the Roman, Reynolds classed ' ' 
 
 the Florentine and the Bolognese school, '' 
 
 together, in his naming of them, " the three great 
 
 schools of the world in the epic style;" and with the 
 
 ' Venetian school he classed the Flemish and Dutch 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 schools, these three schools, he asserted, '*all pro- 
 fessing to depart from the great purposes of painting, 
 and catching at applause by inferior quailities." 
 
 It reflects credit on the personal character of Reynolds 
 
 that after thus addressing the students he busied him- 
 
 . self with " Count Ugolino and his Children 
 
 or tn j^ ^^ Dungeon," a picture which has been 
 ^''^ described as "usually regarded as his most 
 
 successful effort in the direction of historical art." He 
 also in 1772 worked at his picture of " Hebe." But the 
 "epic" (so to name it with him) could never for long 
 command more than the homage of his lips. The year's 
 work in 1772, as in other years, consisted mainly of 
 portraits. Mr. Banks (the Sir Joseph of a later time) 
 sat to Reynolds in January, and Dr. Hawkesworth sat 
 to him in October. In the interim he painted the usual 
 number of beautiful women, among them Mrs. Abington 
 and Mrs. Baddeley. Both were sitting to him when the 
 Pantheon was opened, and Mrs. Baddeley and her escort 
 of young cavaliers won admission there in so remark- 
 able a manner, the constables guarding the entrance 
 being obliged to give way at the sword's point. Sir 
 Joshua himself is found attending a Pantheon mas- 
 querade, where he is in domino, and Goldsmith is in 
 old English dress. 
 
 In this year Garrick and his wife sat to Reynolds, 
 and Northcote played the eavesdropper, with results 
 duly brought to book by him. Interesting sitters 
 crowded. Some of them are named in Dunning, the 
 man of law, not less famed for his ugliness than for 
 
 n6 
 
The Duke's Question 
 
 his cleverness; Mrs. Buller, of Devonshire, traveller 
 and eccentric; and Mrs. Crewe, the beautiful. The 
 Duke of Cumberland and the Commoner's widow whom 
 he had raised to the rank of Royal Duchess also sat to 
 Sir Joshua in 1772, and the Duke showed his con- 
 versational powers in obeying his wife's injunction to 
 say something. " So you always begin at the head, 
 do you ? " said he. 
 
 The Exhibition of this year showed Sir Joshua in six 
 pictures. Four of them were, in the Georgian accept- 
 ance of the word, "poetical" — to wit, "Miss »-,•,. 
 Meyer as Hebe " (gliding up the rainbow), ' 
 
 " Mrs. Crewe as Genevieve," " Mrs. Quar- '' 
 
 rington as St. Agnes," and "White as a Captain of 
 Banditti." The remaining two of them were portraits 
 presenting Robertson, the historian, and Hickey, Gold- 
 smith's friend, whose one failing is thus stated in 
 "Retaliation":— 
 
 " He was — could he help it ?— a special attorney." 
 
 Mrs. Montagu, the Queen of the Blue-Stockings, 
 sat this year to Reynolds. Her picture represents an 
 aged woman with cleverness and distinction in her face. 
 Colonel Dow was also of Reynolds's sitters in 1772. 
 This oiEcer, one likes to hope, illustrated the obverse 
 case to that of General Burgoyne, described as a better 
 playwright than soldier, for Dow was a terribly bad 
 playwright. As usual, work was not allowed to banish 
 recreation. Sir Joshua took his pleasure in Marylebone 
 Gardens in 1772. And honours came with years. In 
 
 117 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 September of 1772 Sir Joshua Reynolds, President of 
 the Royal Academy, was elected alderman of Plympton. 
 
 The list of sitters for 1772, which includes, besides 
 
 those already named, Dr. Johnson (for the Streatham 
 
 picture) and Macpherson (of "Ossian" 
 
 ' fame), is by no means so predominantly 
 
 '' feminine as the one of 1771. Politics were 
 
 quieter, and Johnson and Macpherson, who might have 
 
 come to blows — who did subsequently almost do so— 
 
 were timed for sittings in different months. An early 
 
 copy of the picture of Macpherson by Reynolds may 
 
 be seen at the National Portrait Gallery in London. 
 
 The Fifth Discourse was delivered in 1772. It dealt 
 with those who had excelled in the great style, notably 
 
 ., Raphael and Michael Angelo, between whom 
 
 . there was instituted a comparison in the 
 
 _ ' antithetical manner of the time. ("Raffaele 
 
 JjgQ JQ 
 
 ' had more Taste and Fancy, Michael Angelo 
 '' more Genius and Imagination. The one 
 
 excelled in beauty, the other in energy. . . ." And 
 so on.) Further, there was an analysis made of "the 
 characteristical style," as exemplified, Reynolds held, 
 in the work of Salvator Rosa. 
 
 The list of sitters for 1773 contains the entry "Child," 
 " Shepherd Girl and Shepherd Boy," "Children," often. 
 The children may, Tom Taylor thinks, have 
 •' reference to the group of angels in the first 
 ""^"^3 finished study of "The Nativity," To the 
 
 year 1773 belongs the " Strawberry Girl," one of Sir 
 Joshua Reynolds's most admired fancy pictures having 
 
 iiS 
 
"The Strawberry Girl" 
 
 a child-subject, siich pictures as Muscipula, Robinetta, 
 Dorinda, the Boy with the Cabbage Nets, the Gipsy 
 Boy, the Piping Shepherd. The "Strawberry Girl" 
 was described by Reynolds himself as one of the half- 
 dozen original things which no man ever exceeded in 
 his life-work, A turbaned little damsel, sad, brown- 
 eyed, peering, is the subject of the picture, which is all 
 gold and brown except for glimpses of redness in the 
 child's bunched mouth, her belt, and the (few) straw- 
 berries visible in the pretty peaked wicker-basket which 
 she carries. Rightly named, that basket is a pottle. 
 Allan Cunningham makes Sir Joshua's pride in the 
 " Strawberry Girl " the butt of his sarcasm. " On 
 looking at the work," he says, " it is not easy to see 
 the cause of the artist's preference." The case is that 
 of the lover with his beloved, concerning whom the 
 whisper has ever been: What does he see in her? 
 What the eyes of love see is unfortunately rarely seen 
 by other eyes. Sir Joshua saw his little niece Offy in 
 the " Strawberry Girl," and heart and eyes of him were 
 full of love for his little kinswoman. 
 
 Regarding his way of life at this time Tom Taylor 
 is delightfully communicative. It was a time in which 
 he slackened work to the extent of giving himself ample 
 recreation, whether in the form of participating in a 
 " Blue " party given by Mrs. Ord, or in a Friday night 
 supper at the Club, or a Dilettanti dinner, or a "first 
 night" at the theatre, such as that memorable one 
 in 1773 upon which She Stoops to Conquer was first 
 presented to the public. 
 
 119 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 Among the twelve pictures this year exhibited by 
 Reynolds were the portrait of Mr. and Mrs. Garrick, 
 sitting in their garden, the portrait of Mr. (afterwards 
 Sir Joseph) Banks, the picture of Mrs. Hartley as a 
 Nymph with Bacchus, the Strawberry Girl, and the 
 completed picture of " Count Ugolino and his Children 
 in the Dungeon." While many still endorse the praise 
 of Walpole of Mrs. Hartley as a Nymph, described by 
 him as "charming," few nowadays will agree with 
 him in pronouncing "Ugolino" "most admirable." 
 James Northcote has left it on record that Burke or 
 Goldsmith ("I am not certain which," he adds) sug- 
 gested to Reynolds to paint this Dantean subject, and 
 it is on record that he himself was the model for the 
 emaciated young man in the picture who covers his 
 face with his hand. 
 
 In July of this year Reynolds visited Oxford, where 
 
 he received from the University the honorary degree of 
 
 D.C.L. This visit had caused a bresfk in 
 
 ■ ■' his work upon the picture of the Misses 
 
 ''•^ Montgomery. On his return to London he 
 
 wrote regarding it to Luke Gardiner : ' ' This picture is 
 
 the great object of my mind at present. You have 
 
 already been informed, I have no doubt, of 
 
 ''•^ the subject we have chosen — the adorning 
 
 a Term of Hymen with festoons of flowers. This 
 aff"ords sufficient employment to the figures, and gives 
 an opportunity of introducing a variety of graceful his- 
 torical attitudes. I have every inducement to exert 
 myself on this occasion, both from the confidence you 
 
 1 20 
 
Lady Cockburn and her Children (p. 123). 
 
Dr. Beattie 
 
 have placed in me, and from the subjects you have 
 presented to me, which are such as I am never likely 
 to meet with again as long as I live ; and I flatter 
 myself that, however inferior the picture may be to 
 what I wish it, or what it ought, it will be the best 
 picture I ever painted." The verdict of time does not 
 bear Sir Joshua out in that. 
 
 The portrait of Dr. Beattie was painted this year. 
 It represents him in his Oxonian dress as Doctor of 
 Laws, with his book on the Immutability of Truth 
 under his arm and the Angel of Truth beside him, 
 overpowering Scepticism, Sophistry, and Infidelity, 
 prostrate figures severally wearing the look of Voltaire, 
 Hume, and Gibbon. This preposterous picture has not 
 its like, except in the picture of Dr. Primrose in his 
 gown and bands presenting his book on the Whis- 
 tonian controversy to his wife represented as Venus. 
 It is good to hear that the author of the Vicar of Wake- 
 field indignantly remonstrated with Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 regarding the Beattie portrait. Dr. Beattie himself 
 was well pleased with it, and commended the painter's 
 kindness in supplying him with a mirror which put it 
 in his power, he said, to see every stroke of the pencil. 
 On that Leslie comments: "Sir Joshua was painting 
 from the reflection in the glass — his usual practice." 
 
 Sir Joshua was elected Mayor of Plympton in the 
 year of his receiving his Oxford degree. Mayor of 
 On this occasion he visited his birthplace, Plympton, 
 and presented his portrait to the Corpora- /^jtj 
 
 tion. 
 
 121 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 The plan for decorating St. Paul's, which was warmly 
 taken up in 1773 by Reynolds, fell to the ground 
 through the opposition of the Bishop of London, to 
 whom pictures meant popery. Instead of painting St. 
 Paul's, Sir Joshua was forced to content himself with 
 painting for the Streatham Gallery, which now claimed 
 much of his time. In Mrs. Thrale, who presided over 
 this Gallery, he had a warm admirer if a shrewd 
 observer, as shown in her verses which begin — 
 
 " Of Reynolds all good should be said and no harm. 
 Though the heart is too frigid, the pencil too warm." 
 
 The sitter-list for 1773 contains old names and new. 
 Mrs. Abington's name is still to the fore ; and Mrs. 
 c-ff J- f Hartley, the picture of whom as a Nymph 
 , was exhibited in May, sat to the painter again 
 
 •^ ''^ in August, at which time she was the talk of 
 the town as the heroine of a much-discussed duel. In 
 the same month Lord Bellamont sat to Sir Joshua, 
 having settled a dispute "civilly, by the sword/' with 
 Lord Townshend, a prior sitter to Sir Joshua. Duels 
 were common among Sir Joshua's sitters. 
 
 The "great" still flocked to the studio in Leicester 
 Square. The Duke and Duchess of Cumberland sat 
 for their portraits in February, and the Duke of Grafton 
 sat for his portrait in March. He sat on a Sunday, 
 "let us hope," says Leslie, "after Sir Joshua had 
 taken his nieces to church." Lord Cathcart, proud of 
 his Fontenoy scar, which was kept in view, sat this 
 year for the second time to Reynolds, and Burke 
 
Lady Cockburn 
 
 sat to him for the Streatham picture. Lady Cockburn 
 was painted this year with her children in a picture 
 which is considered one of Reynolds's masterpieces. 
 It was engraved as "Cornelia and her Children." As 
 afterwards in the case of Mrs. Siddons as the "Tragic 
 Muse," Sir Joshua Reynolds painted his name on the 
 embroidered edge of the drapery of Lady Cockburn. 
 "When this picture," says Allan Cunningham, "was 
 taken into the exhibition room, such was the sweetness 
 of the conception and the splendour of the colouring, 
 that the painters who were busy with their own per- 
 formances acknowledged its beauty by clapping their 
 hands. Such eager admiration is of ,rare occurrence 
 amongst brothers of the trade." 
 
 Mrs. Parker was this year painted with her child — a 
 two-year-old boy. This lovable and lovely woman was 
 the wife of John Parker of Saltram, a Devonshire friend 
 of the painter's. New names in the sitter-list are 
 Gardiner and Montgomery. The Right Hon. Luke 
 Gardiner, afterwards Lord Mountjoy and first Earl of 
 Blessington, was an Irishman at this time about to 
 marry one of the three beautiful Misses Montgomery, 
 who are presented as wreathing a terminal figure of 
 Hymen in a picture by Sir Joshua Reynolds which now 
 hangs in the National Gallery. This picture was painted 
 to meet Luke Gardiner's wish to have the portraits of the 
 sisters " representing some emblematical or historical 
 subject." The Memoirs of the late W. J. O'Neill Daunt 
 contain gossiping information on the subject of Luke 
 Gardiner and thesel maidens. "Anne Stewart," writes 
 
 123 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 Mr, Daunt, "niece and heiress of the second Viscount 
 Mountjoy, married her footman, Luke Gardiner, in 171 1. 
 She had interest enoug'h to get him made a privy 
 councillor and appointed Deputy Vice-Treasurer of 
 Ireland. Their son, Charles Gardiner, married Miss 
 Florinda Norman, by whom he had a son, Luke, after- 
 wards created Viscount Mountjoy, who married in 1773 
 Elizabeth, one of the beautiful Miss Montgomerys. 
 These sisters, three in number, produced a rage in 
 Dublin by their charms. . . . When Elizabeth married 
 Luke Gardiner, the gentlemen wore silver lace bows in 
 their hats, the ladies in their bosoms. The servants 
 had bows of white lustring ribbon, with silver buttons, 
 and all had white gloves. The wedding favours were 
 worn for about ten days. The lovely bride [she is the 
 central figure in Sir Joshua's picture] appeared in the 
 stage-box of the theatre, on the Thursday after her 
 marriage, in a pale pink lustring nigligie. Gardiner 
 came forward and bowed to the audience. Mrs. 
 Gardiner blushed, and, with apparent reluctance, rose 
 to curtsey her thanks for the cheers that greeted her 
 appearance. She obtained more confidence sub- 
 sequently, for she called out one night to her spouse, 
 from the gallery of the House of Commons, ' Luke, 
 when shall I send the carriage for you?' " 
 
 The picture of this wonderful lady and her sisters 
 affects beholders very differently. Some see in it a 
 noble group, while others with asperity describe it as 
 a picture of three British young ladies in fancy dress 
 linked together by a festoon of flowers, to form an 
 
 124 
 
Children of Condition 
 
 allegory which is neither poetical nor illuminative. 
 That is wrong, for it is fully illuminative. The three 
 young ladies were on the eve of marriage, as is inti- 
 mated by the painter in the plainest picture-language. 
 
 Children of condition who sat for their portraits to 
 Sir Joshua Reynolds in 1773 were Master Cox, painted 
 as Hannibal, Master Parker, Master Cockburn, and 
 Master Edgcumbe. The portraits of these four boys 
 rank high among the painter's work, that of the beauti- 
 ful eight-year-old Richard Edgcumbe in especial being 
 admired. 
 
 Sir Joshua in 1774 exhibited no fewer than thirteen 
 pictures. One was a whole-length portrait of the 
 Dikchess of Gloucester ; another was a e> j -i • 
 picture of her daughter, the Princess 
 Sophia, a lovely little child. The Misses ^^ ^774 
 Montgomery were exhibited, and one of the exhibits of 
 this year was a picture of Mrs. ToUemache as Miranda. 
 If no work by Reynolds other than this were known, 
 James Barry would be borne out in his jeer having refer- 
 ence, it has been held, to Reynolds, at the painter "who 
 imagines that he can, merely from his acquaintance with 
 the map of the face, travel with security over the other 
 regions of the body, every part of which has a peculiar 
 and different geography of its own." Reynolds in his 
 picture of Mrs. ToUemache as Miranda shows himself 
 consummate in knowledge of the map of the face, but 
 not so in knowledge of the geography of the arms and 
 hands. Besides portraits of persons named, there were 
 in Reynolds's contribution to this year's exhibition two 
 
 125 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 portraits presenting severally a lady and a gentleman 
 unnamed. There was a portrait of Lord Bellamont in 
 the robes of the Bath, and there was a portrait of the 
 son of Lord Edgcumbe. The picture of Dr. Beattie, 
 named "The Triumph of Truth," a half-length portrait 
 of Bishop Newton, and a head of Baretti were also 
 exhibited. The head of Baretti is accounted masterly. 
 This Italian painter was exceedingly short-sighted, and 
 the most has been made of this fact, the picture thereby 
 gaining great individuality. 
 
 With the pictures exhibited by Reynolds in 1774 was 
 " Lady Cockburn and her Children," and with them was 
 the " Infant Jupiter." "Vigorous but not equal to the 
 Infant Hercules," is the sentence passed by one of Sir 
 Joshua's biographers on this Infant who is presented 
 with an eagle. Of the eagle it is known that it had its 
 home in Sir Joshua's back-yard. The Infant, truth to 
 say, suggests no more exalted habitat, which is the less 
 matter for satisfaction that an infant named so loftily 
 as he imperatively demanded presentment anticipating 
 Wordsworth's description of infancy in the poem which 
 treats of intimations of immortality from recollections 
 of childhood. 
 
 Among Sir Joshua's sitters for 1774 were the writers 
 Burke (painted for the Thrales), Malone, and Mason. 
 The picture of Mason, highly respected in his own time 
 as parson, poet, and painter, has still interest from his 
 connection with Sir Joshua Reynolds. A sample of his 
 observations on Sir Joshua's method of colouring has 
 been given on a prior page of this book. 
 
 126 
 
Lady Betty Stanley 
 
 Among beautiful women who sat to Sir Joshua in 
 1774 were two young brides, Georgiana, Duchess of 
 Devonshire, nie Spencer, and Lady Betty Stanley, nde 
 Hamilton. He had painted the Duchess as a little 
 child — there is a portrait of her by him in the National 
 Portrait Gallery in London which represents a dollish 
 little maiden, all but the head of her (which is charming) 
 impossible. He painted Lady Betty as he loved to paint 
 brides, adorning an altar of Hymen. The said altar in 
 Lady Betty's picture is further adorned by there being 
 perched on it Sir Joshua's macaw, promoted to this 
 position from his perch in the painter's dining-room. 
 
 At the close of the year 1774 Sir Joshua delivered his 
 sixth Academy Discourse. It dealt with imitation and 
 invention. Invention in it was equivocally 
 described as a faculty acquired by being 
 conversant with the works of others. The ' 
 
 Discourse was brought to a close with the ' ' '' 
 
 oft-quoted counsel: "Study the great works of the 
 great masters for ever. Study, as nearly as you can, 
 in the order, in the manner, and on the principles on 
 which they studied. Study nature attentively, but 
 always with those masters in your company; consider 
 them as models which you are to imitate, and at the 
 same time as rivals with whom you are to contend." 
 
 127 
 
CHAPTER IX. 
 
 WORK OF THE LATER 'SEVENTIES: 
 "THE MARLBOROUGH FAMILY" PICTURE, AND OTHERS. 
 
 The outbreak of the war with America rendered the 
 year 1775 one of the saddest in England's history, and 
 . it has been asserted that Sir Joshua's con- 
 ar wt nection with the great men of both sides 
 ' must have aroused m him a keen mterest 
 ' ' "* in the events of the time. The fact would 
 
 contrariwise seem to be that his connection with both 
 sides helped him to preserve his natural balance. The 
 public indifference to the war allowed social life to take 
 its wonted course, and while brilliant and beautiful 
 women — such as the Duchess of Devonshire and Mrs. 
 Sheridan — scored triumphs in London, it was not in Sir 
 Joshua's nature, to whom both these reigning favourites 
 sat in 1775, to concern himself very seriously with what 
 was going on in the colonies. The far-off had little 
 power to enlist his interest, except when brought to 
 his painting-chair in the person of, say, an Otaheitan. 
 The Otaheitan Omiah sat to Reynolds in this year. He 
 is painted without feathers, in which respect he presents 
 a less savage appearance than the English ladies at this 
 time painted by Sir Joshua. It was a time in which 
 
 128 
 
Sir J. Reynolds (p. 14). 
 
Dr. Robinson 
 
 feather head-dresses reached a towering height of 
 fashion, and though Sir Joshua, here as everywhere, 
 acted as moderator and lowered the ladies' feathers, he 
 dared not lower them to the vanishing point. 
 
 To the year 1775 are referred Sir Joshua's portrait 
 of himself holding his ear-trumpet, and his portrait of 
 himself for the Dilettanti Club, as also his _, . 
 portrait of Johnson in which the Doctor 
 holds a book close to his eyes. The picture ^ ^''^ 
 of little Miss Bowles, known as "Love me, love my 
 dog," now to be seen in the Wallace Collection, was 
 painted this year — Miss Bowles is a round-faced, round- 
 eyed little girl, who is well-pleased to sit and hold her 
 dog, — and to 1775 belongs the picture called " CoUina," 
 presenting Lady Ann Fitzpatrick as a little peasant in a 
 mountain landscape. 
 
 Sir Joshua's pictures at the Exhibition of this year 
 were twelve in number, among them being Mrs, 
 Sheridan as St. Cecilia, Dr. Robinson in a half-length 
 portrait, and the picture of a beggar-boy and his sister 
 known as "The Boy with Cabbage Nets." Dr. Robin- 
 son's portrait was the picture of the year. It won 
 countless eulogists, among them Walpole, who wrote, 
 "Sir Joshua has produced the best portrait he ever 
 painted — that of the Primate of Ireland, whom age has 
 softened into a beauty," 
 
 The picture of Mrs. Sheridan was also much admired.^ 
 
 ' There is a portrait by Reynolds of this good and gifted lady in the 
 Corporation Gallery of Glasgow. In contradistinction to the picture 
 of her as St. Cecilia, praised by Tom Taylor for "the splendour of its 
 
 129 K 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 It was one of two St. Cecilias painted by Sir Joshua in 
 
 1775, for iti this year he painted Mrs. Weddell as 
 St. Cecilia in a picture which Tom Taylor describes 
 as "neither more nor less than a plagiarism from 
 Domenichino." " The Boy with Cabbage Nets" is one 
 of Reynolds's few pictures of low life, and lacks vigour 
 and truth, which fact notwithstanding it has many 
 admirers. 
 
 Hannah More is authority for much regarding Rey- 
 nolds in the later 'seventies, and her praise of his 
 religious works belonging to the year 1776 is much 
 quoted. The "Infant Samuel" of that year much 
 delighted her, as did the "Young St. John" painted in 
 
 1776. In this place it may be pointed out that Sir 
 p 1- ■ Joshua Reynolds's religious pictures are now 
 p • f^ allowed by the ablest judges to be, relatively 
 
 speaking, failures, and his " Infant Samuel" 
 is not to be set atop of his pictures because it has been 
 the one of them most often reproduced, and is the 
 darling picture of the British nation. The reference is 
 here to the " Praying Samuel" in the National Gallery, 
 a picture representing a little English boy upon his 
 knees. There is another young Samuel by Sir Joshua 
 Reynolds which is well known to Londoners. It is the 
 picture in the Dulwich Gallery entitled "The Prophet 
 Samuel," and representing a brown-eyed boy with curly 
 chestnut hair and bare shoulders. His right hand is 
 
 colour," the Glasgow portrait is very sober-hued, and its beauty has 
 connection witli the grave and winsome expression in the charming 
 sideway face which it presents. 
 
 130 
 
Reynolds's Versatility 
 
 advanced, the left holds his white drapery; over both 
 arms a dark-brown mantle is passed. 
 
 Hannah More was in London the guest of the 
 Garricks, and to this year belongs Reynolds's masterly 
 full-face portrait of Garrick with folded hands and lifted 
 thumbs joined together. At this time Garrick was 
 giving his farewell performances in London, but there 
 is nothing of age save its benignity in the face of the 
 sexagenarian actor painted by Reynolds. 
 
 Sir Joshua's versatility was strikingly manifested in 
 the twelve pictures which he sent to this year's Exhibi- 
 tion, and which included the striking portraits 
 of Lord Temple, David Garrick, and Mrs. . 
 Montagu, the beautiful picture of the ^^ ^'' 
 Duchess of Devonshire descending a flight of steps, 
 the delightful Master Crewe as Henry VIIL ("Master 
 Herbert" at the same time was exhibited as Bacchus), 
 the impressive " Omiah," and the tenderly pious 
 "Young St. John " and " Child Samuel," as the picture 
 by Hannah More called "Samuel" is called in the 
 Academy catalogue. 
 
 On the loth of December of this year, Sir Joshua 
 delivered his Seventh Discourse to the students of the 
 Royal Academy. He in it concerned himself 
 largely with the mental aspect of painting. . 
 " It has been," said he, " my uniform en- ' 
 
 deavour, since I first addressed you from '' 
 
 this place, to impress you strongly with one ruling 
 idea. I wished you to be persuaded that success in 
 your art depends almost entirely on your own industry; 
 
 131 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 but the industry which I principally recommended is 
 not the industry of the hands, but of the mind" "A 
 painter," he said further, "stands in need of more 
 knowledge than is to be picked oiF his pallet, or 
 collected by looking on his model, whether it be in life 
 or in picture. He can never be a great artist who is 
 grossly illiterate." In this year the first six Discourses 
 were translated into the Italian by Baretti, 
 
 One Mrs. Willett, whose portrait was pjunted by 
 Reynolds in 1776, acquires note through a paragraph 
 on the subject of her picture in the first number of The 
 Connoisseur, published in September 1901. " In the 
 excellent pair of portrait-heads of Captain and Mrs. 
 Willett, by the same master [Reynolds]," says in that 
 journal the writer of the paper called "In the Sale-room/' 
 ' ' is found an example of the wide discrepancy in value 
 which exists between the sexes in the auction-room. 
 Mr. A. Wertheimer cheerfully paid 1,620 guineas for 
 the lady, whilst the Captain was separated from his 
 consort, though in every way her equal as a work of 
 art, by a bid of 150 guineas. It is interesting to note 
 that for this portrait of Mrs. Willett, Reynolds received 
 ;^36 iss., as testified by his autograph invoice." 
 
 As regards what the writer of the foregoing calls 
 " the wide discrepancy in value which exists between 
 the sexes in the auction-room," it has, of course, its 
 explanation in the fact that the purchasers of pictures 
 at the figures quoted by him are mostly men, and that 
 men more admire and desire the pictures of beautiful 
 women than those of beautiful men. On the other part, 
 
 132 
 
Reynolds "Clubbable" 
 
 they pay handsomely for the pictures of men of name 
 and fame, even when these persons are very unhand- 
 some. 
 
 Sir Joshua was much in society in 1777, and was 
 " clubbable " as ever. He proposed Dr. J. Warton at 
 the Club in this year, and had the pleasure . 
 
 of seeing him made a member. In later 
 years he was to paint fine portraits of this 
 fine scholar and kindly man. At the Ladies' Club balls 
 the painter was a welcome guest, and gaieties with 
 Gibbon form part of the chronicle of this time. The 
 theatres, too, preserved their attraction for Reynolds. 
 Sheridan had stepped into the shoes of Goldsmith, and 
 Sir Joshua was as assiduous in attendance at the 
 comedies of the new Irish playwright as he had been at 
 those of the Irish playwright deceased. Recreations, 
 however, did not banish work. 
 
 The Exhibition of the year contained thirteen pictures 
 
 by the President, among them the admired painting of 
 
 the little daughter of the Duke of Buccleuch t -i v 
 
 in the snow. ' ' Best of all — delicious, " wrote . 
 
 . . . of 1777 
 
 Horace Walpole in his characteristic vein, -' ''' 
 
 " is a picture of a little girl of the Duke of Buccleuch, 
 
 who is overlaid, with a long cloak, bonnet and muif, in 
 
 the midst of the snow, and is perishing, blue and red, 
 
 with cold, but looks so smiling and good-humoured 
 
 that one longs to catch her up in one's arms, and kiss 
 
 her till she is in a sweat, and squalls." 
 
 In this year was exhibited Reynolds's picture known 
 
 as the " Little Fortune-Teller," at present in the collec- 
 
 133 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 tion of Sir Charles Tennant. In it a little girl is telling 
 a little boy his fortune. They are playing the children's 
 favourite game of " pretending." He is an earl's son, 
 with his style and title Lord Henry Spencer, and she is 
 an earl's daughter, his sister, the Lady Charlotte. He 
 is dressed to suit his rank, but she has her skirt bunched 
 up, and has a handkerchief round her head — ^you are to 
 see in her a gipsy. 
 
 The famous picture of the Russell family, representing 
 three boys and a girl, was also exhibited in 1777. Little 
 Lord William Russell was naughty, so runs a legend 
 regarding this picture, declared that he would not be 
 painted, and huddled against a wall in anger. "Keep 
 where you are, my little man," said Sir Joshua, and the 
 picture shows the boy as he posed himself. Little Lord 
 William's naughtiness, by a striking perversion of the 
 laws of morality, redeems the picture from dulness. 
 
 Naughty children and good children alike helped Sir 
 Joshua. Thus a teasing little girl supplied him with the 
 one bit of action in the Marlborough family group, 
 which was painted this year, and which presents eight 
 persons in inaction, with the exception of this little girl. 
 She holds a mask in front of her face, thereby terrifying 
 her little sister. The Marlborough picture, which is 
 deservedly famous, is styled by Tom Taylor " the finest 
 family picture ever painted by an Englishman." 
 
 To return to Sir Joshua's Exhibition pictures of this 
 year. Walpole, who did not praise them all, praised 
 "The Boy Reading" as "very fine, in the style of 
 Titian." The Dilettanti pictures, representing, the 
 
 134 
 
Lady Betty Delme 
 
 members of the Dilettanti Club in impressive groups, 
 were begun this year, and in it the New College window 
 at Oxford was determined on, and Reynolds was 
 appointed to furnish the design. In his sitter-list for 
 1777 is the entry: "Boy and Mother (for Nativity)." 
 Other entries in the list for that year which arrest 
 attention are Mr. Hoole, Miss Monkton, Lady Betty 
 Delm^, Sir William Hamilton, Angelica KaufFmann, 
 Mr. Huddesford, and Mr. and Mrs. Musters. Mr. — 
 or, to give him the title by which he is better known, 
 Dr. — Hoole was the translator of Tasso and Ariosto. 
 He was also painted by Miss Reynolds, and Tom Taylor 
 praises her portrait of him, which is prefixed to his 
 Ariosto. Miss Monkton was an heiress and blue- 
 stocking who was excessively stout. Sir Joshua 
 cleverly contrived to make the best of her under this 
 aspect. The picture of Lady Betty Delmd is enchanting. 
 She is a sweet, pensive mother, against whom leans a 
 sturdy, handsome boy; while her arm is stretched to 
 clasp him and his sister, a roguish little girl. A little 
 dog that, not without good reason, seems to feel some- 
 what out of it with this tender trio, bids for attention. 
 
 Regarding the picture of Sir William Hamilton (now 
 in the National Portrait Gallery, London), the husband 
 of Romney's " Divine lady," a travelled Irishman writes: 
 " This is a most attractive picture, pleasing, delightful. 
 It gives the impression of luxury and refinement. It is 
 an attempt, successful, at decoration. Yet the volcano 
 in the background, evidently painted from memory, is 
 puzzling." The writer of that knew not of the book, 
 
 135 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 Observations on Mount Vesuvius by Sir William Hamil- 
 ton. It appeared in 1772, and the fame of its authority 
 hung still about Sir William when Sir Joshua painted 
 him with a volcano in the background. The Mr. 
 Huddesford among this year's sitters (" Huddesford ! 
 what a name ! " exclaimed Mrs. Cholmondeley, herself 
 the bearer of a name that has evoked much exclamation) 
 had been a pupil of Reynolds, and was at this time 
 filling the varied callings of parson, painter, and lam- 
 pooner. An enthusiastic connoisseur besides, in this 
 respect like his friend, Mr. John Codrington Warwick 
 Bampfylde (" What a name ! "), Reynolds has paihted 
 Mr. Huddesford with this friend in the charming picture 
 called " Portraits of Two Gentlemen " in the National 
 Gallery in London. Mr. Huddesford is there the keen- 
 faced man who looks out of the picture, while Mr. 
 Bampfylde, with his face full of that "sensibility" 
 which made him in dolorous succession lover, son- 
 neteer, and madman, is dreamily eyeing the objects of 
 vertu that are before him and his friend. 
 
 The Mr. and Mrs. Musters of the pocket-book of 
 1777 have interest as parents of the John Musters who 
 married Mary Chaworth, Byron's first love. Mrs. 
 Musters, a beautiful and unhappy woman, is well 
 known in Reynolds's portrait of her as " Hebe," which 
 is necessarily smiling, just as, necessarily smiling, Mrs. 
 Musters bore her heartache. The elder John Musters 
 has admirers in all beholders of Reynolds's picture 
 known as " Squire Musters." This squire, who is the 
 beautiful ideal of a Georgian Englishman, stands hat 
 
 136 
 
The Confiding Fanny 
 
 in hand with crossed feet. Under him is an English 
 greensward, and over him is an English sky. He 
 balances himself with a stout stick which his right hand 
 holds pressed to his hip. He looks a man to win and 
 hold a woman's love, and he won but did not hold the 
 love of the exquisite woman who was painted by 
 Reynolds in the year of her marriage in 1777. She 
 stands at the top of a flight of garden-steps against a 
 background of trees in flower, and a spaniel, with head 
 lifted to hers, is at her feet. Her back and back- 
 turned face are towards the spectator as she busies her 
 hands, with thoughts far elsewhere, with picking 
 masses of tree-blossoms. Among Lord Cheylesford's 
 mezzotints there is a charming one of this Mrs. 
 Musters engraved by John Raphael Smith. 
 
 Evelina appeared in 1778, and Reynolds sat up all 
 night to read it, and made even a greater pet of Miss 
 Fanny Burney than he had made of Miss Hannah 
 More, but, writes the confiding Fanny, "he did not 
 make love." 
 
 The Academy Exhibition of 1778 contained the 
 Marlborough picture and three others, being „ j,i,-f 
 only four pictures by Reynolds in all, but the . 
 Marlborough group alone contained eight '' 
 
 figures, or nine if the petticoated statue is included. 
 
 Politics this year became very lively. Prospects of 
 invasion from France caused camps to spring up in 
 England, and Sir Joshua visited these camps. The 
 ladies donned the uniforms of their husbands, and 
 Lady Worsley, the wife of Sir Richard Worsley, captain 
 
 137 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 of a regiment of Hants militia, was painted by Sir 
 Joshua in the uniform of that regiment. 
 
 The death of Chatham on the floor of the House of 
 Lords gripped all England at the heart, and the 
 disaster of Keppel at Ushant raised a stir which — the 
 relations between Reynolds and Keppel being what 
 they were — cannot but have quickened the heartobeat 
 of the customarily placid painter. 
 
 Not that he made a noticeable pause in work. This 
 year he published his Seven Discourses, with a dedi- 
 _ cation to the King which has been justly 
 
 . admired for its dignity, and in it he also 
 
 J° delivered the Eighth Discourse. In it he 
 
 . harked back to the preceding one in assert- 
 
 ing that the principles of art, whether 
 poetry or painting, have their foundation in the mind. 
 He maintained that novelty, variety, and contrast in 
 their excess become defects, and that excess of sim- 
 plicity is disagreeable. Finally, he pointed out that 
 rules are not to be always observed in their literal 
 sense, that it is sufficient to preserve the spirit of the 
 law. As usual with him, he directed attention to the 
 practice of the old masters. What follows was his 
 illustration of his dictum, "the greatest beauties of 
 character and expression are produced without con- 
 trast." . . . "St. Paul preaching at Athens, in one of 
 the Cartoons, far from any affected academical con- 
 trast of limbs, stands equally on both legs, and both 
 hands are in the same attitude : add contrast, and the 
 whole energy and unaffected grace of the figure is 
 
 138 
 
Contrasts 
 
 destroyed. Elymas the sorcerer stretches both hands 
 forward in the same direction, which gives perfectly the 
 expression intended. Indeed, you never will find in the 
 works of RafFaelle any of those school-boy affected con- 
 trasts. Whatever contrast there is, appears without 
 any seeming agency of art, by the natural chance of 
 things." Reading that one calls to mind how " the 
 natural chance of things " had given the all of contrast 
 which Sir Joshua Reynolds had elected to mark his 
 picture of the Marlborough family exhibited by him this 
 year. Was he thinking of his own work while he 
 instanced Raphael's ? 
 
 The sitters of 1778 included many beautiful women, 
 in especial nameworthy among them being Lady Beau- 
 mont (wife of Sir George), Mrs. Payne , 
 Galwey, and Miss Campbell. Besides the "^ 
 pretty child painted pickaback in the de- '' 
 lightful picture of Mrs. Payne Galwey, Reynolds in this 
 year painted the children of Mr. Parker, the little girl 
 in the mob cap which made so wonderful a part of 
 little girls' attire in those days, and her ten-year-old 
 brother in a red suit, which contrasts with the white 
 of the girl's frock and with the rose-colour of her 
 ribands. j 
 
 A picture by Sir Joshua, which was engraved m 1778 
 by John Raphael Smith, and which must have been 
 painted in this. year or earlier, is the portrait of Mrs. 
 Carnac — a beautiful tall lady amid beautiful tall trees — 
 at present in the Wallace Collection in London. 
 
 Keppel's court-martial took place this year, and brave 
 
 139 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 words were spoken and brave tears were shed, and 
 " Little Keppel," as his sailors called great Keppel, 
 was acquitted, and the lights of London lighted up 
 the skies. In all this Reynolds had a joy that over- 
 flows in a letter written by him to his old friend. 
 
 Yet that palette of his which was held by a stick was 
 
 not set aside. The year's work opened with the 
 
 " Nativity," and a great part of the year was given 
 
 ,, jij ,. to this production, witness the information 
 
 „ ~ regarding, work and sitters given by Leslie 
 
 . and Taylor; under January: "Boy, Girl, 
 
 ' Girls ; Mother and Child ; Girl, red hair ; 
 ^'^^^ Children (Nativity models);" under Feb- 
 
 ruary: "Nativity models;'' under April: "Nativity 
 models, including the Ox;" under July: "Hard at 
 work repainting Nativity;" under August: "Working 
 from Nativity models, old man, and infants ; " under 
 September: "Still on Nativity models." It was Sir 
 Joshua's most ambitious effort in the direction of sacred 
 art, and he spared no labour upon it, howbeit he found 
 time for portrait-painting also. Keppel had his portrait 
 painted for Burke, Lee, and Dunning as a testimony of 
 his gratitude to them as the counsel engaged in his 
 trial, and Reynolds was, of course, the painter employed 
 by Keppel. The marked difference between the sailor 
 of the later pictures and the sailor of Reynolds's first 
 picture of Keppel has been made matter of comment. 
 There was a Dutchman in Keppel as in Reynolds, and 
 in both men time made the Dutchman more and more 
 manifest himself. 
 
 140 
 
A Record Price 
 
 Garrick's death took place this year, and his funeral 
 was attended by Reynolds, whose pocket-book for the 
 day fixed for that ceremony has the entry ' ' Mr. 
 Garrick." 
 
 The Exhibition of 1779 showed Reynolds in the 
 picture of the Nativity with the three separate figures 
 of Faith, Hope, and Charity. Walpole r. . •. • 
 termed the Nativity very great, and noted ■*! ^ *" 
 
 that Mrs. Sheridan posed for the Virgin, °^ "•' 
 
 and "the old beggar-man" (White of the ^^^^ 
 
 " Ugolino ") for Joseph. The Virtues, which less pleased 
 him, were termed by him "very middling." 
 
 Besides these pictures, Reynolds contributed to the 
 Exhibition of 1779 three whole-lengths of ladies, two of 
 whom are named by Walpole as Lady Louisa Manners 
 and Lady Crosbie, a whole-length of a young girl, a 
 three-quarters of a lady and child, and two portraits of 
 gentlemen, one of them Andrew Stuart, a Scotsman 
 whose name at that time was familiar in men's mouths. 
 
 "The Nativity" was bought from Reynolds by the 
 Duke of Rutland, who paid £1,200 for it, a sum de- 
 scribed as "a price for an English picture at 
 that time quite unexampled." The English /■„ <r% 
 picture in question was to the initiated a -y , . . „ 
 staring imitation of an Italian picture, but -^ 
 
 the Duke of Rutland was not of the initiated, and he 
 paid for it as for a Correggio the spuriousness of which 
 he had not the perspicacity to see. "It is in rather 
 curious contrast," writes Leslie, who resolutely ignores 
 the circumstance that Reynolds's attitude in politics was 
 
 141 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 not taken into account by his contemporaries, for 
 which reason it need the less be taken into account 
 by his biographers — "It is in rather curious contrast, 
 considering the feeling of the Court towards Keppel, 
 that while Sir Joshua was painting the portraits com- 
 memorative of his friend's gratitude to Lee and Burke, 
 he was honoured with sittings for the first 
 portrait of the Queen he had been asked to 
 ■^ paint, the one now in the Royal Academy, 
 
 '^ ' and intended to grace the great lecture-room 
 ''^ of the new Academy rooms in Somerset 
 
 House, now rapidly approaching completion." 
 
 Reynolds's absorption in his painting work made his 
 Whiggism have no more in it than is in a name. Fears 
 of invasion even could not communicate 
 jj^ . . themselves to him. When the French were 
 ^°*^^ expected, as they were this year expected, 
 to drop upon Plymouth, when the enemy was held to 
 menace his own loved native county, even then he 
 could write to Lord Ossory: "I have been able to do 
 more work than I think I ever did in any summer 
 before. My mind has been so much occupied with 
 my business that I have escaped feeling those terrors 
 that seem to have possessed all the rest of mankind." 
 One thinks of Goethe, between whom and Sir Joshua 
 Reynolds there are meeting points other than this one 
 of political torpor. 
 
 Lord Ossory's daughter. Lady Gertrude, had sat as a 
 little child to Reynolds, and had been painted by him 
 crouching with a bunch of grapes in her hand; in this 
 
 142 
 
The Prince of Wales 
 
 year he again painted her in a picture which has been 
 engraved as " Silvia the Mountain Maid." 
 
 Other portraits of this year which have been specially 
 praised are those of the Countess of Bute (walking in a 
 garden, umbrella in hand), Lady Louisa Manners, Lady 
 Jane Halliday, and Miss Monkton, All these portraits 
 are full-lengths. Admired half-lengths of the same year 
 are those of Primate Robinson (in hat and walking- 
 dress), Admiral Keppel, and Admiral Barrington. The 
 heads of Lady Beaumont and Gibbon are especially 
 extolled, and the " Silvia" and the " Una" of this year 
 have their warm admirers. 
 
 The sitters entered in the pocket-book for 1779 
 include the King in May, and the Queen and the Prince 
 of Wales in December. A portrait of the 
 Prince of Wales by Reynolds hangs to-day .^'^ 
 
 in the National Gallery in London. It is ' 
 
 a beautiful picture of a very handsome '' " 
 
 young man, telling little of him, but quite as much as 
 any one should want to know of a person who is best 
 described in the words by Leigh Hunt's " Old Lady" 
 applied to a contemporary of his termed by her "a 
 sad loose man, but engaging." 
 
 143 
 
CHAPTER X. 
 
 AS THE TRAGIC MUSE," AND OTHER PICTURES. 
 
 The work of the year 1780 began with the " Nativity,'' 
 with which Sir Joshua Reynolds continued to busy him- 
 self in spite of its having been exhibited in 1779. Only 
 in the May of the year 1780 did he finally put it out 
 of hand. He also in this year worked on the Keppel 
 portraits, which are praised as not so much repetitions 
 as distinct pictures. A Keppel of 1780 may be seen among 
 the Reynoldses at the National Gallery in London. 
 
 In this year Sir Joshua was the guest of the Duke 
 and Duchess of Rutland at Belvoir. He had painted 
 the Duke's father, the famous Marquis of Granby, and 
 he now painted the Duchess and her two eldest children. 
 These pictures, with many other precious Reynoldses, 
 were lost in the disastrous fire at Belvoir in 1816. 
 General Oglethorpe, the fine old Georgian soldier, 
 loved by all and praised by Pope, was the subject of 
 one of those Belvoir paintings, and one the loss of 
 which is the more to be deplored that it was not 
 engraved. 
 
 Topham Beauclerk's death took place in 1780. This 
 fine gentleman was the life, if not the soul, of the Club, 
 
 144 
 
Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse (p. 155). 
 
Theory on Clouds 
 
 and by a striking illustration of the attraction between 
 opposites, was held in deepest affection by Dr. Johnson, 
 who was inconsolable for his death. Reynolds had 
 painted Beauclerk, and his "Una" of 1779 had been 
 Beauclerk's little daughter " Lady Di." His lovely and 
 gifted wife, herself a painter — and as such by Walpole, 
 in a rapturous moment, set above all the Academi- 
 cians — was also painted by Reynolds. 
 
 The Academy was moved to Somerset House this 
 year, and the public for the first time ga^ed upon the 
 work with which the Academicians thought „ , 
 
 fit to adorn the new bundmg. At each end , ., 
 
 of the lecture-room were figures of "Genius," . j 
 "Design," "Composition," and "Painting," f^ Somerset 
 by Angelica KaufFmann, who represented „ 
 Painting as colouring from the rainbow. „' 
 
 Many and divers nationalities are represented 
 in the names of the painters who shared with the lady 
 named KaufFmann the honour of adorning the new 
 Academy of Arts of England. It will suffice to enu- 
 merate here Cipriani, Carlini, NoUekens, Biaggio, 
 Rebecca, West. Of course, the President contributed 
 to the ornamentation. The ceiling of the library was 
 painted by him. To look up at it was to behold a 
 figure of Theory seated on clouds, with a scroll bearing 
 the inscription "Theory is the knowledge of what is 
 truly Nature." This unhappily conceived adornment 
 is rendered the more deplorable by being, as has been 
 pointed out, a direct plagiarism from one of Raphael's 
 fresco figures in the Santa Maria del Popolo. 
 
 MS L 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 At the end of the lecture-room, facing the door, were 
 Sir Joshua's full-length portraits of the King and Queen, 
 for which he had with difficulty procured sittings. In 
 this room, too, was the President's portrait of himself, a 
 duplicate of the one sent to Florence, and his admired 
 portrait of Sir William Chambers, the architect from 
 whose designs Somerset House was completed. 
 
 Over the door leading to the great room was written 
 in Greek, " Let none uncultured enter.'' As none 
 uncultured would know Greek this mandate could not 
 hold them back, while the pleasure of the cultured in 
 it would be the less, that it is altered from the Pytha- 
 gorean, and in a manner that has made one of the 
 learned assert that it makes indifferent Greek. 
 
 The Exhibition of the year in which the Academy 
 was moved to Somerset House is whimsically described 
 Fxhihitm ^^ Johnson in the art-jargon of the times as 
 
 o ' follows : " There is contour and keeping, 
 
 grace and expression, and all the varieties of 
 artificial excellence." Among Reynolds's contribution 
 to this Exhibition were his head of Gibbon and his 
 "Una," severally ranked with his best portraits and 
 his most charming fancy pictures. While the Exhibition 
 was in progress Sir Joshua was at work on his picture 
 of the three Ladies Waldegrave, the daughters of the 
 beautiful Lady Waldegrave, now Duchess of Gloucester, 
 so often painted by him in former years. The picture 
 of the three sisters was painted for their uncle, 
 Horace Walpole, who censured the bad painting of the 
 hands in it, and who unwillingly paid the not im- 
 
 146 
 
Reynolds in Devon 
 
 moderate price demanded for it, considering its great 
 loveliness. Walpole, on the other hand, was most 
 appreciative regarding the portrait of Lord Richard 
 Cavendish, the Eastern traveller and virtuoso, painted 
 this year by Reynolds, and characterised by him as 
 " one of the best, if not the best, of Reynolds's 
 works." 
 
 Like all the rest of the "great" world, Sir Joshua 
 went out of town in the summer, and in 1780 he made 
 his outing extend to Devonshire, going thither via 
 Bagshot, where he was Keppel's guest prior to being 
 the guest of Dunning at Spitchwick, on Dartmoor. 
 The pocket-book itinerary shows him to have visited 
 in turn all the cherished places associated with his 
 youth and early manhood in his native county, as 
 Port Eliot, Saltram, Plympton, Mount Edgcumbe, 
 Exeter. 
 
 The Ninth and the Tenth Discourses were delivered 
 this year. The Ninth was delivered at the opening of 
 the Royal Academy in Somerset Place, and dealt briefly 
 with the advantages to society of cultivating intellectual 
 pleasures. The Tenth Discourse had sculp- -^. ,, 
 ture for its subject, and sculptors present were 
 told: "If my observations have hitherto 
 referred principally to Painting, let it be ' 
 
 remembered that this art is much more ' 
 
 extensive and complicated than Sculpture, and affords 
 therefore a more ample field for criticism ; and as the 
 greater includes the less, the leading principles of 
 Sculpture are comprised in those of Painting." The 
 
 147 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 severe condemnation of modern dress for statues 
 is the most striking feature of the Discourse. Here 
 Sir Joshua took up an unhappy, and, as has been 
 shown, an untenable attitude between the artists who 
 arrayed eighteenth century Englishmen in togas and 
 those who represented them naked, as did Barry in 
 his "Death of Wolfe." 
 
 The sitters of the year, as entered in the pocket-book, 
 were comparatively few. Burke sat to Reynolds in 
 July, and among the sitters preceding him 
 ' in time was Prince William of Gloucester. 
 ' This was the son of Lady Waldegrave by 
 
 her second marriage. The little Prince is represented 
 in full-length, standing. He wears a Vandyke dress, 
 and the picture is described as "very silvery." To 
 Walpole it was very "washy." Lord Harcourt also 
 sat to Sir Joshua in 1780 for the beautiful picture of 
 him and Lady Harcourt and General Harcourt which 
 delighted Tom Taylor at Nuneham. And the Streatham 
 portraits busied Reynolds during part of the year 1781, 
 the opening of which he spent at Streatham as the 
 guest of the Thrales, with Dr. Burney, whose portrait 
 he now began. 
 
 The " Thais" representing Alexander's mistress, torch 
 in hand (one recalls Dryden's famous words : 
 
 " Thais led the way 
 To light him to his prey "), 
 
 was also painted and exhibited this year. Walpole pro- 
 nounced it too masculine. 
 
 148 
 
Reynolds at Antwerp 
 
 The Exhibition contained no fewer than fourteen 
 pictures by the President. Four of them belonged to 
 the class called "ideal": the "Thais," the e- z -z • 
 "Death of Dido," and the figures of .^*^^*^- 
 " Temperance" and "Fortitude" for the *^°"' '7Si 
 Oxford window. Two were fancy pictures representing 
 a " Child Asleep ■' and a " Listening Boy." The sleep- 
 ing child (a babe in a cot) is described by Mr. Pulling as 
 "lovely." The others were portraits all more or less 
 admirable, those coming under the former denomina- 
 tion being the portrait of Dr. Burney, that of Master 
 Bunbury, that of Lord Richard Cavendish, and that of 
 the three Ladies Waldegrave. 
 
 In this year Sir Joshua Reynolds made a tour in 
 the Low Countries and the Rhine-land. His observa- 
 tions as set down in writing, whether in the 
 form of pocket-book jottings or letters, are 
 very characteristic. And here is a jotting : 
 "Antwerp. The ordinary people very ordi- ' 
 
 nary, without one exception." Here is a ' 
 
 passage from a letter to Burke : " Dutch pictures are a 
 representation of Nature, just as it is seen in a camera 
 obscura. After having seen the best of each master 
 one has no violent desire of seeing any more." That is 
 unflattering, and what follows is keenly sarcastic: "I 
 have often thought the habit they [the Dutch] have 
 acquired of fighting against Nature has given them a 
 disposition never to leave Nature as they find her." 
 That too was written to Burke, and to Burke was 
 written the account of the village called Brock, which 
 
 149 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 anticipates the description of a Dutch village as like a 
 thing enchanted, which delighted all English readers of 
 Maeterlinck's book called The Life of the Bee. To 
 find Sir Joshua Reynolds anticipating Maeterlinck is to 
 find the race common to these two men asserting itself 
 in a very remarkable manner. 
 
 "We went," writes Sir Joshua to Burke, under date 
 August the 24th, 1781, "to a village called Brock, which 
 appeared so different from anything we had seen before 
 that it appeared rather like an enchanted village, such 
 as we read of in the Arabian tales ; not a person to be 
 seen except a servant here and there. The houses are 
 very low, with a door towards the street which is not 
 used, and never has been used, except when they go 
 out of it to be married, after which it is again shut up. 
 The streets, if they may be so called, for carriages 
 cannot enter them, are sanded with fine ink-sand ; the 
 houses painted from top to bottom, green, red, and all 
 sorts of colours. The little gardens, with little fountains, 
 and flower-knots, as neat as possible, and trees cut into 
 all kinds of shapes ; indeed, I much wonder if you can 
 find a tree in its natural shape all over Holland, and we 
 may add, nor water neither, which is everywhere kept 
 within bounds." 
 
 Opie's appearance in London, where he took the 
 world of fashion by storm as the self-taught "Cornish 
 boy," belongs to this year. Sir Joshua pronounced the 
 new painter "like Caravaggio, but finer," and no one 
 asked, "But how?" 
 
 The sitters of the year included Lady Salisbury and 
 
 150 
 
The Hertford Sisters 
 
 Lady Harcourt, Lady Lincoln and Lady Elizabeth 
 Conway, Oflfy and Mr. Gwatkin (to whom she was 
 married this year), the sons of Mr. Bromell,^ Sitters 
 Mrs. Abington, and Mrs. Nisbett. The „' 
 
 last-named lady was painted as Circe, with 
 a white cat on her lap and a leopard at her side. 
 Other "poetical" pictures had occupied Sir Joshua 
 in 1 78 1, hence the November entry: "Child; Girl and 
 Boy models; Lamb." 
 
 The pictures of the sisters Lady Lincoln and Lady 
 Elizabeth Seymour Conway, daughters of Francis, first 
 Earl of Hertford, may be seen to-day in London in the 
 Wallace Collection at Hertford House. The portrait of 
 Lady Elizabeth, who died at the age of seventy-one 
 years, unmarried, shows her at the age of twenty-seven 
 years. She has a handsome, haughty, loveless face, in 
 spite of the beautiful Cupid's bow in her mouth. Her 
 elder sister. Lady Lincoln, is painted at the age of thirty 
 years. Her features are less handsome than the Lady 
 Elizabeth's, but her whole face is suffused with tender- 
 ness, which is especially marked in the large lovely eyes. 
 
 Conspicuous sitters abounded with Sir Joshua in the 
 early part of 1782. Enough to name the four-year-old 
 Master Brummell, the beautiful Mrs. Robin- , 
 
 son, who in her rble of Perdita so charmed _' 
 
 the Prince of Wales that he became her ' 
 
 Florizel, but soon tired of the part; the eccentric 
 
 ' Mr. Bromell— the name is better known in the form of Brummell — 
 was Lord North's private secretary, and the younger of the boys in this 
 picture became the famous "Beau Brummell." 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 William Beckford; and the " Fair Greek," as Mrs. Bald- 
 win, the wife of the English Consul at Smyrna, was 
 called. Dr. Adam Ferguson, the eminent Scotsman, 
 who combined the study of politics with that of moral 
 philosophy, also sat to Sir Joshua early in this year. 
 
 The Exhibition of 1782 contained fifteen pictures by 
 E- 7 .. • Sir Joshua — almost all portraits, among 
 ,. which especial interest attaches to those of 
 
 1782 ^^^' Robinson (Perdita), "The Fair Greek" 
 
 (Mrs. Baldwin in Smyrniote dress), Colonel 
 Tarleton, and Lord Chancellor Thurlow. 
 
 Opinions differ on the subject of the picture of Colonel 
 Tarleton. In the year of its exhibition Dr. Wolcot, 
 under his pseudonym of Peter Pindar, wrote : — 
 
 " Lo, Tarleton dragging on his boot so tight ! 
 His horses feel a god-like rage. 
 And yearn with Yankees to engage — 
 I think I see them snorting for the fight." 
 
 Tom Taylor, writing many years later, wrote : — " The 
 whole-length of Colonel Tarleton is among the painter's 
 happiest conceptions. A more unbecoming dress than 
 that of the Colonel for a soldier has never been devised, 
 not even in England, and in no picture has Reynolds 
 triumphed more completely over materials that would 
 have proved unmanageable in any other hands. He 
 could not make the Colonel stand upright or sit on his 
 horse without looking supremely ridiculous, and he 
 has therefore chosen for him a half-stooping attitude, 
 in which he appears to be adjusting his sword." In 
 further comment we get this: " He has placed him in 
 
 152 
 
Palsy 
 
 the heat of action, which his animated expression would 
 be sufficient to tell us, did not the start of a horse 
 Jjehind him make us hear the roar of artillery." 
 
 In November of 1782 Sir Joshua sat to Gainsborough, 
 but the progress of the portrait was interrupted by a 
 stroke of the palsy, which caused Reynolds's physician 
 to order him to Bath. On his return to London he 
 did not resume sittings with Gainsborough, whom he 
 next saw on his death-bed. He himself was so entirely 
 restored to health that Miss Burney, on seeing him 
 upon his return to London, writes: "He looks vastly 
 well, and as if he never had been ill." 
 
 Mrs. Siddons now began to be "the rage" in London, 
 and Reynolds and Gainsborough both desired to paint 
 her, and the desire of both was granted unto them. 
 
 The Eleventh Discourse was delivered in 1782. It 
 treated of genius as consisting principally in the com- 
 prehension of a whole. Horace Walpole Ele-aenih 
 held that Sir Joshua in his own work pushed r){sf.„urse 
 this theory to a culpable length, and sneers j-rSa'' 
 
 at him for painting draperies which repre- Genius 
 sent clothes, never their materials, and for , 
 painting hands which are seldom tolerably drawn. 
 
 The sitters of the year included, besides those here 
 already named, men and women of names worth noting. 
 Such men are Burke, Dunning (now Lord 
 Ashburton), and Fox; such women, the „' 
 
 Duchess of Rutland, who now took up a ' 
 
 high place in the world of fashion and politics, Mrs. 
 Abington, aforetime so often a sitter to Sir Joshua, and 
 
 153 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 (a new sitter) La Bacelli, the famous dancer, painted 
 and exhibited this year by Gainsborough. 
 
 Crabbe's early days of literary struggle belong to 
 this time, and it was in the early part of the year 1783 
 that Sir Joshua Reynolds submitted "The Village" to 
 Dr. Johnson on behalf of the poet who was author 
 of it. It is strange to find the most urbane of painters 
 befriending at the outset of his career the man who was 
 to be described as " Nature's sternest painter." 
 
 The Exhibition of 1783 contained ten pictures by the 
 
 President, among them not one masterpiece, which 
 
 T ., . . caused Horace Walpole to write: "Sir 
 
 'Joshua seems to decline since his illness." 
 
 ' "^ However that may have been, Sir Joshua 
 
 was to find his strength again. Peter Pindar, like 
 
 Horace Walpole, deplored Sir Joshua's deterioration in 
 
 lines which began "We've lost Sir Joshua!" The 
 
 dirge was premature. 
 
 Nuneham, the seat of the Harcourt family, was in 
 1783 much visited by Sir Joshua, and in this year he 
 paid a second visit to the Continent, making a sojourn 
 in the Low Countries, where he added to his store of 
 art-treasures by purchases made in Bruges, Ghent, 
 Brussels, and Antwerp. 
 
 In the spring of this year Sir Abraham Hume, the 
 scholar and connoisseur, had sat to him. Sir Abraham 
 was a Fellow of the Royal Society, and one of the 
 founders of the Geological Society. Sir Joshua, whose 
 intimate frieijd he was, painted him more than once, 
 and one of his portraits of him hangs in the National 
 
 154 
 
Mrs. Siddons 
 
 Gallery in London. Sir Abraham has in it a childish, 
 small, pink face, with bunched mouth and tip-tilted 
 nose. He looks alive. 
 
 At Hertford House in London is another work which 
 may perhaps be referred to this year — the portrait of 
 Mrs. Richard Hoare and her infant son. The beauti- 
 ful gentle-faced mother in this picture has a classical 
 profile, and forms a marked contrast to her splendid 
 bullet-headed baby, supposed to be the " Master 
 Hoare" painted five years later by Reynolds. 
 
 Mrs. Siddons is thought to have sat to him for the 
 "Tragic Muse" on his return from this outing. The 
 conception of her portrait has been traced to n-ri. 
 
 Michael Angelo's "Isaiah," and Mrs. Sid- ' . 
 
 dons's claim to have herself evolved her ^^^ 
 
 striking pose has been dismissed as a piece ' 
 
 of self-delusion. As regards the merit of the ' ' "^ 
 
 picture, opinion is not to-day so undivided as it was in 
 the lifetime of Sir Joshua and for long afterwards. 
 
 Tom Taylor held it to be " the finest example, prob- 
 ably, of truly idealised portraiture." It being granted 
 that idealised portraiture — whether "truly" idealised 
 or not is a matter of individual opinion — is admissible, 
 the picture cannot but win entire admiration. While, 
 however, a growing number of the discriminating hold 
 that it is not the business of portraiture to idealise, 
 it may fairly be left an open question whether this 
 picture is Sir Joshua Reynolds's greatest portrait. 
 
 "Idealised" as she is supposed to be in the picture, 
 Mrs. Siddons has, happily, a pleasant reality. She 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 sits on clouds indeed, but her chair is of solid wood, 
 and her foot is upon a solid footstool. Her dress is 
 largely "drapery," but it is Georgianly adjusted, with 
 the result- that one feels that she is dressed as well as 
 draped. Her hair is dressed, too, as hair is dressed 
 at a mirror, and either she or the painter has not been 
 sparing of pearls. By a pleasing accompanying circum- 
 stance, a pearly colour prevails in the picture, where it 
 has not deepened to gold or darkened to brown, the 
 brown of that brown rug that Sir Joshua loved so well. 
 It is laid on Mrs. Siddons's knees in this picture, and 
 in a picture not far from it presenting the Prophet 
 Samuel, it drapes the prophet. 
 
 When all is said, Mrs. Siddons is not so much the 
 Trag'ic Muse as she is Mrs. Siddons, though undoubt- 
 edly she would be Mrs. Siddons by just so much more if 
 she were not the Tragic Muse in counterfeit. A portrait 
 in its essence is a counterfeit, and he who lets the 
 sitter yet further counterfeit does very ill-advisedly. 
 
 As regards the number of this famous portrait extant, 
 it is safe to transcribe the statement that "it exists 
 in several versions, of which one is in the Dulwich 
 Gallery." It has for long been matter of doubt whether 
 this picture shares with the one in the possession of the 
 Duke of Westminster the distinction of being the work 
 of Sir Joshua Reynolds. In the Connoisseur of January 
 1902 may be read: "The picture of Mrs. Siddons as 
 the Tragic Muse in the possession of the Duke of 
 Westminster and that at the Dulwich Gallery are 
 replicas, and were both entirely painted by Sir Joshua 
 
 156 
 
Duchesses 
 
 Reynolds. Mr. Algernon Graves informs us that there 
 are records in Sir Joshua's books confirming the 
 authenticity of both pictures. The matter is fully gone 
 into in vol. iii. of Graves and Cronin's History of Sir 
 Joshua Reynolds's Works. " 
 
 Though full of work throughout the year 1784, Sir 
 Joshua nevertheless managed to work in no X784: 
 
 small amount of play. He was in capital Work and 
 condition bodily, and his spirits rose pro- Play 
 
 portionately. 
 
 The interesting portrait of Fox, in which he is re- 
 presented with the India Bill which he vainly tried to 
 get passed, was painted in 1784. Politics ran very 
 high in the early part of the year, but Sir Joshua as 
 usual kept a quiet head, painting his duchesses — in 
 the spring of this year the Duchess of Rutland, and in 
 the summer of it the Duchess of Devonshire, both of 
 them painted by him in prior years. The two ladies 
 were in fierce political opposition, but they took the 
 same painting-chair in succession with grace. 
 
 Lord Rodney in the flush of his fame sat to Sir 
 Joshua, and Lord Eglinton sat to him in his Highland 
 dress. Other sitters of this time were Sir William 
 Hamilton the virtuoso, and Mr. Pott the surgeon. 
 
 In connection with Mr. Pott, some remarks contained 
 in the Connoisseur of September 1901 are quoted 
 here : — 
 
 " On looking over the record of the year's sales of prints . . . 
 one is struck with the pre-eminence of pretty ladies, and the 
 nearly universal contempt for the male person. . . . What of 
 
 157 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 the mezzotint portrait of the portly Mr. Pott, of London, which 
 sells for a matter of fifteen shillings? . . . Mrs. Pott, as Venus 
 playing with a Cupid, is good for ;£soo- Mr. Pott is not 
 wanted." 
 
 Poor Mr. Pott ! 
 
 The Exhibition of 1784 showed that the world had 
 not "lost" Sir Joshua. It contained two striking 
 mother-and-child pictures in Lady Dashwood 
 Exhibition, ^^^ Lady Honywood, each with her child, 
 '^ "^ two striking male portraits in Fox and 
 
 Warton, the admired portrait of Miss Kemble, Mrs. 
 Siddons's sister, the "very arch" (as Walpole styles 
 it) presentment of Mrs. Abington as Roxalana, and the 
 world-famed Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse, which 
 Walpole appraised in less than a dozen words : " Head 
 very fine, left arm too large." 
 
 The relations between Sir Joshua Reynolds and 
 
 Thomas Warton call here for comment. Many 
 
 _, courtesies had passed between these two. 
 
 Thomas -,^ , , . ^, t-t 
 
 „r J Warton had written verses on the JNew 
 
 vVCLftOft 
 
 College windows painted by Sir Joshua, 
 and, over-flattering as they were. Sir Joshua was well- 
 pleased with them. When in 1785 Warton succeeded 
 to the poet-laureateship, he owed this advancement, as 
 he frankly owned, in no small measure to the friendly 
 exertions of Sir Joshua. 
 
 With the President of the Royal Academy a founda- 
 tion member, in the most extended sense of that phrase, 
 of the Literary Club, it is not to be wondered at that 
 literature more and more during his life-time concerned 
 
 158 
 
"A Little Favour" 
 
 itself with art. Prose critiques in the form of press 
 critiques followed upon poetic critiques. " Peter Pindar 
 spared the painters this year," writes Tom Taylor; but 
 he shows that the Morning Post did not do so. He 
 quotes a " smart critic " of that paper, and incidentally 
 makes manifest that about this time art-criticism began 
 in smart criticism. 
 
 In this year Ramsay died, and Sir Joshua succeeded 
 him as King's painter, with a salary of jQ^o a year. 
 This was after soliciting the honour, the 
 denial of which would, it is evident, have . * 
 
 caused the President of the Royal Acaderny 
 to resign his post. As matters took their course, he 
 recovered his equanimity, which had been greatly 
 disturbed by strife' within the Academy and royal in- 
 difference. " I am glad," wrote Johnson to him on 
 his nomination to the position of King's painter, ' ' that 
 a little favour from the Court has intercepted your 
 furious purposes." The King's dislike of Reynolds 
 caused the painter to derive no direct advantage from 
 his promotion, so to style it, but he derived indirect 
 advantage from it. 
 
 The death of Johnson took place this year. He had 
 been guide and philosopher, as well as friend, to 
 Reynolds. "The observations," said the pt ^j. f 
 painter, ' ' which he made on poetry, on life, ■' 
 
 and on everything about us, I applied to our •' ' 
 
 art; with what success let others judge." ' '*' 
 
 This is a striking tribute. The philosopher, on his 
 part, had loved the painter well, and his trust in 
 
 1 59 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 him was seen in his selection of him for one jof his 
 executors. 
 
 The Twelfth Discourse was delivered this year. In 
 it students of the Royal Academy were told that 
 particular methods of study are of little consequence 
 
 — that little of art can be taught. " Our 
 Twel/iA studies," said Sir Joshua, " will be for ever, 
 ' in a very great degree, under the direction of 
 " '^ chance; like travellers, we must take what 
 
 we can get, and when we can get it ; whether it is or is 
 not administered to us in the most commodious manner, 
 in the most proper place, or at the exact minute when 
 we would wish to have it," For the rest, in the 
 Twelfth Discourse, as in those preceding it, Sir Joshua 
 makes continuous praise of the old masters, and defends 
 — not to say recommends — assimilation, adaptation, 
 and appropriation of their work. " Receiving from the 
 dead and giving to the living, and perhaps to those who 
 are yet unborn," is to him a thing of which artists 
 " surely need not be ashamed." 
 
 The sitter-list for 1784, as given by Leslie, contains 
 the entries: "The Lord Chancellor's gown; Dog; 
 
 Mr. Hay's dog." Boy and girl models are 
 ' of frequent occurrence ; the entry " Soldier " 
 ' ■^ also occurs often, and there is the entry 
 
 " Infant " for the picture of the Infant Hercules. Of the 
 many sitters entered by their names, three invite 
 particular attention — Mrs. Robinson, the Princess 
 Gagarin, and Mr. Boothby. To these names may be 
 added " Mr. Boothby's lady," entered in December of 
 
 160 
 
Lord Heathfieia (p. 173)- 
 
A Recent Discovery 
 
 1784, an entry to be brought into line with that cited 
 by Tom Taylor from Sir Joshua's account-book of 1783, 
 "Jan., Mr. Boothby, for a lady — ;^io5." 
 
 The portrait of Mrs. Robinson painted by Reynolds 
 in 1784 is probably that at present to be seen in the 
 Wallace Collection in London, being one of 
 three pictures of Mrs. Robinson as Perdita ^f^ 
 
 which hang together at Hertford House. ■^''^•'^^*^'*" 
 The painters of these pictures were severally **"** 
 
 Reynolds, Gainsborough, and Romney. Gainsborough, 
 in a large picture, the background of which is a land- 
 scape, presents a sleepy-eyed girl with a dog. Romney 
 presents a lady in cap and muff. She has a sweet, 
 whimsical face, and is awake. Reynolds's picture is 
 that of a handsome woman in deep meditation. All 
 who see it will not agree with Northcote in his opinion 
 expressed to Ward that " Reynolds's portraits of Mrs. 
 Robinson were complete failures." 
 
 The Princess Gagarin, who sat to Sir Joshua in 
 September 1784, is to be noted as the only princess 
 who sat this year to the newly-appointed King's painter. 
 
 The untiring Mr. Algernon Graves, in a paper called 
 " Recently-discovered Portraits by Sir Joshua Rey- 
 nolds," contributed to the Connoisseur of January 1902, 
 gives some account of Mr. Boothby, together with a 
 reproduction of the picture of him painted by Reynolds 
 in 1784. This reproduction is from the original painting 
 now at Petworth in the possession of Lord Leconfield. 
 The sitter was, according to Mr. Graves, Charles 
 Boothby Skrymshire, with his nickname " Prince 
 
 i6i M 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 Boothby," and his " lady " was, Mr. Graves suggests, 
 one Miss Elizabeth Darby, whose picture is reproduced 
 on the page facing that containing the picture of her 
 supposititious lover. The original of this illustration is 
 also at Petworth. Mr. Graves's data on the subject of 
 the gentleman with his baptismal name Boothby, and 
 with his courtesy title "Prince," are interesting, as are 
 those which he gives regarding the beautiful woman 
 entered as "Mr. B.'s lady." There is here a romance 
 that would well repay him who should follow it up. 
 
 162 
 
dHAPTER XI. 
 
 WORK OF THE LATER 'EIGHTIES: "ANGELS* HEADS" 
 AND OTHER PICTURES. 
 
 The pictures exhibited in 1785 by Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 were sixteen in number, and included a "Venus," later 
 to be known as " The Snake in the Grass." ^^ 
 
 This picture now hangs in the National „ , . 
 '•Jallery in London. Opinions widely vary on „ 
 
 the subject of it. Some are distressed by the * ' 
 
 collision of nose and hand in it — the whilom ' ^ 
 
 Venus, it will be remembered, has her hand raised to 
 the level of her face, — to others " The Snake in the 
 Grass " unreservedly commends itself as a luscious 
 picture, splendid in tone, and justifying the Arabs in 
 their dictum, " Praised be Allah, who has made beautiful 
 women." Certain it is that the eye of this woman is 
 living. The most living eye perhaps on canvas, it is 
 good seen near, and is better seen at a distance. 
 
 Peter Pindar's criticisms of 1785 were very sharp. 
 West was not spared, nor was his royal patron spared. 
 Said Peter Pindar : 
 
 " But Reynolds is no favourite, that's the matter. 
 He has not karnt the noble art to flatter." 
 163 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 Two portraits numbered among the finest painted I . 
 Reynolds belong to this year. They present severajl 
 Joshua Sharpe, the lawyer, and John Hunter, tlj 
 anatomist. 
 
 Boswell sat this year to Reynolds, being unwilling, ; 
 he wrote to the painter, to defer longer a pleasure tlj I 
 „ jj cost of which he was still unable to defraj I 
 
 ^.,. but which he undertook to meet, or hail 
 
 met, within a specified period. "In til 
 meantime you may die, or I may die," he writes, " aql 
 I should regret very much that there should not be ) I 
 Auchinleck my portrait painted by Sir Joshua Reynold| I 
 with whom I have the felicity of living in social ill 
 timacy." By a course of events the foreknowled^ I 
 of which would have greatly delighted the imp! 
 cunious gentleman who desired to provide for h| 
 picture by Sir Joshua Reynolds being hung at Auchi^ 
 leek, it is now hung at the National Gallery I 
 London in the same room with Johnson's picture b 
 Sir Joshua Reynolds. The Boswell of Sir Joshua! 
 picture has a pallid, keen face, small, calculating eyei I 
 a pinched mouth, and a sharp nose. There is 
 suggestion of white mouse about this man that i | 
 remarkably unpleasant. 
 
 The Duke of Orleans, on a fourth visit to Engl 
 land this summer, sat to Sir Joshua Reynolds I 
 who thus became the painter of one of the mosi 
 remarkable actors in that great drama, the Frencl| 
 Revolution. 
 
 Irksome as was all travelling — especially travelling I 
 164 
 
Angels' Heads (p. i7o). 
 
A Picture Censured 
 
 by water — at that time, a great picture sale at Brussels 
 took Sir Joshua across the Channel again p. ^ , 
 this year, and he is stated to have spent . ^^^^^ ^* 
 "about ;^iooo" in purchases. The w^t^n Brussels . 
 of his pictures paid for in 1785 contains ' ^ 
 
 the entries: — 
 
 " Brook Boothby, Esq., for a landscape £'^7 10 o 
 Count d'Adhemar, for a Girl with a 
 
 Mouse-trap - - £^z 10 o" 
 
 Sir Joshua, it is seen, had not exclusively busied himself 
 with portrait-painting. 
 
 " The Infant Hercules " was much in hand during 
 the early part of 1786. The picture contains many 
 figures, among them the blind Teresias, ^, 
 
 for the head of which Reynolds took the 
 head of Johnson. " It is," writes Tom 1 >> 
 
 Taylor, " a confused, straggling picture, ' 
 
 quite beyond the power of the painter to ' 
 
 manage," and he adds that, though Burke defended Sir 
 Joshua's selection of a mythological subject, modern 
 opinion is likely to go along with Hannah More, who 
 preferred the subject suggested to Sir Joshua by Horace 
 Walpole, the Czar Peter at Deptford exchanging his 
 own dress for a ship-carpenter's before he goes to work 
 in the Dockyard. 
 
 It was probably the fine gentleman in Sir Joshua 
 which would not allow him to present to an Empress 
 an Emperor in a ship-carpenter's suit, and it remains 
 
 16s 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 open to question whether the best taste would have 
 been shown in an Englishman's reminding a Russian 
 ruler that her foregoer on the throne had fitted himself 
 for his position in England. What appears to Tom 
 Taylor the singularity of the subject chosen does not 
 seem to have struck Leslie, who writes without com- 
 ment on other than the obvious aspect of the thing that 
 the subject chosen by Sir Joshua Reynolds for his 
 picture commissioned by the Empress Catharine was 
 " the Infant Hercules strangling the Serpents, in 
 allusion to the power of Russia, then in its infancy." 
 Mr. Pulling terms the picture "great," and this opinion 
 is one which was once largely held. Fuseli expressed it 
 in the extraordinary words, " It teems with man, but 
 without the sacrifice of puerility." 
 
 It is now very generally held that Sir Joshua wasted 
 precious time over this picture, the infant in which alone 
 is invested with some interest. To Tom Taylor it was 
 " full of vigour." To the present writer there is no 
 vigour manifest in the girl-faced little boy, who appears 
 less to be strangling snakes than frolicking with them, 
 while that Providence which presides over children's 
 games makes this game a less dangerous one than it 
 seems. A thing to be observed in passing is that 
 the infant, bating its face, is very German-looking— 
 a fact to be brought into connection with Leslie's state- 
 ment that "the attitude of the little Hercules was 
 suggested by an old German woodcut." There was 
 probably more taken from the old woodcut than the 
 attitude. 
 
 i66 
 
Rival Actresses 
 
 Thirteen pictures were exhibited in 1786 by the Presi- 
 dent. They included four masterly portraits of men, 
 being those of Joshua Sharpe, John Hunter, zp ,-,■ 
 John Lee (the Solicitor-General), and ^^htbits 
 Thomas Erskine (late , the counsel for ^^ ^^^^ 
 Keppel); and they included the full-length portrait of 
 the Duke of Orleans, two lovely heads of women, 
 severally Lady Spencer and her sister, the Hon. Miss 
 Bingham, and the admired fancy picture, " A Child 
 with Guardian Angels." 
 
 The portrait of Miss Bingham represents a rosy, 
 brown-eyed maiden. Her name was Anne, and with 
 her father's advance to an earldom she became the Lady 
 Anne. Though she lived to old age she never married. 
 She must have worn her garters red. 
 
 Social engagements still let play give the equipoise to 
 work in the case of Sir Joshua, and he was as regular a 
 theatre-goer as ever. Mrs. Jordan was now enchanting 
 the town, and Sir Joshua, while retaining admiration 
 for Mrs. Abington, extended homage to her rival. 
 The one comedian presented the "arch" and the other 
 the "artless" to perfection, and Sir Joshua was suffi- 
 ciently an Englishman of his time to bring relish to 
 archness and artlessness in female personation. Among 
 noted women of a graver type who were his hostesses 
 at this time may be named Mrs. Siddons, Mrs. Robin- 
 son, and Mrs. Hastings, the last-named the wife of 
 the unfortunate statesman just now about to face the 
 charges brought against him by Burke. 
 
 Picture-buying and picture-cleaning took up much of 
 167 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 Sir Joshua's time in the closing years of his life, and to 
 1786 belongs a curious series of letters written by him 
 to the Earl of Upper Ossory. They concern a damaged 
 picture by Titian which the Earl requested Sir Joshua 
 to restore, and which Sir Joshua counselled the Earl 
 to exchange with him for Gainsborough's "Girl and 
 Pigs." This exchange did not commend itself to the 
 nobleman. 
 
 Cagliostro and the Chevali^re D'Eon were this year 
 in London, and regarding the last-named remarkable 
 person a statement made by Leslie is of interest. 
 According to it, Charles Reade possessed an unfinished 
 portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds which traditionally 
 bore the name of the Chevalifere, " It is not easy," says 
 Leslie, "to decide on what authority." 
 
 The Thirteenth Discourse was delivered this year. 
 
 Art, said Sir Joshua in it, is not necessarily imitation, 
 
 ■ T ^^^ 's under the direction of the imagination, 
 
 tr een ^^^ j^^ proceeded to set forth in what manner 
 
 ' poetry, painting, and other arts depart from 
 
 ' nature. "Poetry," he said, "addresses 
 
 itself to the same faculties and the same dispositions 
 
 as Painting, though by different means. ... It sets 
 
 out with a language in the highest degree artificial, a 
 
 construction of measured words, such as never is, nor 
 
 never was, used by man. . . . Having once adopted a 
 
 style and a measure not found in common discourse, it 
 
 is required that the sentiments also should be in the 
 
 same proportion elevated above common nature, from 
 
 the necessity of there being an agreement of the parts 
 
 168 
 

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 ^-^^ 
 
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 ^'' ,,';;:•■ 
 
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 '"*fr-\"^^^;-'^ 
 
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 ^^B^|r"^« 
 
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 ■:■'/■'' U- ■'"'?■: 
 
 MBL^ft-. 
 
 
 "■Uff" 
 
 
 oHIB^^^a.^^%1.^ 
 
 ^ 
 
 .P.-^;^ -.1«l?il 
 
 Simplicity (p. 177). 
 
The Ignorant Present 
 
 among themselves, that one uniform whole may be 
 produced. ... So far, therefore, is servile imitation 
 from being necessary, that whatever is familiar, or in 
 any way reminds us of what we see and hear every day, 
 perhaps does not belong to the higher provinces of art, 
 either in poetry or painting. The mind is to be trans- 
 ported, as Shakespeare expresses it, beyond the ignorant 
 present, to ages past. Another and a higher order of 
 beings is supposed ; and to those beings everything 
 which is introduced into the work must correspond. 
 Of this conduct, in these circumstances, the Roman 
 and Florentine schools aiford sufHcient examples. 
 Their style by this means is raised and elevated above 
 all others ; and by the same means the compass of art 
 itself is enlarged." 
 
 Under its literary aspect the Thirteenth Discourse — 
 in this respect, it is right to say, not standing alone — 
 may fairly be praised for its grammatical correctness 
 and propriety of expression. The part explanation of 
 this fact is to be found in a letter addressed to Malone 
 by Sir Joshua Reynolds, under date 1786. In this 
 letter may be read : "I wish you would just run your 
 eye over my Discourse ... in regard to grammatical 
 correctness, the propriety of expression, and the truth 
 of the observations." 
 
 The sitters of 1786 were very numerous. The Prince 
 of Wales this year sat to Sir Joshua; and so did Mrs. 
 Fitzherbert, the unfortunate lady who was to suffer 
 with those who put their trust in princes. The Duke 
 of Portland, to whom Sir Joshua, it is thought, this 
 
 169 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 year acted as adviser in his purchase of the now 
 famous Portland vase, sat to him. Burke and Malone 
 were of his sitters in 1786 ; so w^as Mrs. 
 Sitters of Bjuifigton. He had sitters week-days and 
 ^7°^ Sundays; a child at ten o'clock one Sun- 
 
 day for the picture of Hercules, and divers models 
 for the same picture another Sunday. Dead men 
 speak no protests, and Dr. Johnson was of the silent 
 dead. 
 
 The usual number of "golden boys and girls" — to 
 give Shakespeare's name for them to children of con- 
 dition — sat to Sir Joshua in 1786, among them the little 
 , daughter of Lord William Gordon, for the 
 ■^5B& "Angels' Heads" now in the National 
 
 ^'^ Gallery in London. This is the picture 
 
 before which generations of British ma,ids and matrons 
 have come to a standstill with the exclamation, " Dear 
 Sir Joshua!" It is Sir Joshua's version of the olden 
 dictum: Not angles, but angels. Blue eyes and gold 
 hair are here, and the five facets of one face are not 
 so like but they are sufficiently unlike for angels. The 
 courtier-mystic Swedenborg (Sir Joshua's contemporary) 
 would have approved the picture, which is conceived in 
 the very spirit of his action, when, in answer to a young 
 gentlewoman's request that he would show her an angel, 
 he led her to a mirror. The young gentlewoman painted 
 as an angel by Sir Joshua was painted, conformably to 
 his practice, from her reflection in a mirror. 
 
 As regards the facet view of a face which underlies 
 Sir Joshua's "Angels' Heads," the picture should be 
 
 170 
 
The "Shakespeare*' Pictures 
 
 compared with a French portrait painted a hundred 
 years and more before — to wit, Philippe de Cham- 
 paigne's " Cardinal Richelieu," painted thrice on the 
 same canvas — in full face and in two profiles — the 
 picture which results being hung at the National 
 Gallery in London in a room adjoining that in which 
 hangs the five-fold presentment of the face of Frances 
 Gordon. 
 
 The Sm3rthe and Harrington groups busied Sir Joshua 
 in the early part of 1787, his labour here resulting in 
 two beautiful pictures of English motherhood, the one 
 presenting Lady Smythe and her children, the other 
 Lady Harrington and her children. 
 
 Boydell's "Shakespeare" also belongs to this time. 
 The ambitious print-publisher undertook to issue a series 
 of pictures by the first artists of the day in 
 illustration of the plays of Shakespeare. To ,,'^1,1, 
 an avowed admirer of "the grand style," as , ,, 
 
 was Reynolds, the poet Shakespeare could '^ ' 
 not fail to make a strong appeal, and it ' ' 
 
 seems that he in 1765 had acceded cheerfully to John- 
 son's request to supply his edition of Shakespeare with 
 some notes. Contrariwise, an unpleasant story has it 
 that it needed the bribe of ;^Soo to induce him in 1787 
 to promise to contribute three pictures to Boydell's 
 Shakespeare Gallery. He painted them in due course, 
 and they represent severally " Puck," " Macbeth," and 
 the " Dying Cardinal Beaufort." All that can be said 
 in praise of them is said when it is conceded that 
 " Puck" is the very picture of mischief. An engraving 
 
 171 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 of this picture was among the study ornaments of 
 Douglas Jerrold in his cottage at Putney, so pleasantly 
 described by his son, and he who has at this day a 
 cottage at Putney will not do amiss to give space on 
 its walls to Sir Joshua Reynolds's " Puck." Macbeth 
 and the witches over-taxed the powers of Sir Joshua, 
 who started with a fatal miscalculation, the witches in 
 the poem numbering three — and no more. The " Death 
 of Cardinal Beaufort " was in its day accounted power- 
 ful, but its day is over, and it is now accounted weak. 
 
 The pictures publicly exhibited by Sir Joshua in 1787 
 
 were thirteen in number. One of them was a full-length 
 
 of the Prince of Wales in Garter robes, with 
 
 ' a black servant arranging his dress. This 
 
 ' ' picture occupied the place of honour in the 
 
 Great Room at Somerset House. 
 
 Two heads of men were a part of Sir Joshua's contri- 
 bution. One was Boswell's and the other Sir Harry 
 Englefield's, the last-named being termed by Walpole 
 the best portrait in the room. Child-portraits by the 
 President abounded. A little lordling was portrayed 
 hunting a butterfly, hat in hand. This was Lord 
 Burghersh. A little gentleman was portrayed with a 
 bird on his hand and a dog at his feet. This was 
 Master Yorke, the son of the Hon. Mr. Yorke. 
 Besides the painting of Lord William Gordon's little 
 daughter as a cherub-head in different views, there was 
 one of little Miss Ward with her dog. 
 
 In the article " Recently-dijscovered Portraits by Sir 
 Joshua Reynolds," contributed by Mr. A. Graves to the 
 
 172 
 
Portrait of Miss Ward 
 
 Connoisseur of January 1902, there is some interesting 
 matter regarding this child-portrait and its present 
 whereabouts, and an illustration of it accompanies the 
 article. Miss Ward is a ringleted little girl who 
 wears the enormous hat of 1787 — it is one of no 
 smaller dimensions than that worn by Lady Spencer and 
 Miss Bingham respectively, who were painted in the 
 same year. The little girl ' is not so much pretty as 
 she is pleasing by reason of her youth — she is eight 
 years old — and the demure, sidelong look which she 
 wears. She is probably not thinking, though she looks 
 thoughtful, in this respect like her dog, which almost 
 to a certainty is not thinking. Her grace is the grace 
 of Reynolds. 
 
 In 1787, as in other years, gaieties gave relief to 
 gravities in the life of Sir Joshua Reynolds. Society 
 saw much of him; he was gay as ever. q,. » , 
 Public theatricals and private theatricals — -^ 
 the Richmond House theatricals were a „ 
 
 brilliant feature of this year — alike won his > / / 
 
 attendance. The charges against Hastings formed the 
 chief political topic of the time, and Sheridan's Begum 
 speech was made the theme of the loudest praise. The 
 part here taken by Sir Joshua would seem to have been 
 that of a man with a bothered ear, and if, despite the 
 well-known condition of both his ears, this does not 
 command the highest homage, it equally does not call 
 for the deepest censure. 
 
 Lord Heathfield sat to Sir Joshua in 1787, and the 
 portrait which resulted is that which is to be seen 
 
 173 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 to-day in the National Gallery in London. Persons 
 who pass this picture by as that of a red-faced gentle- 
 man in red, vouchsafing it no further consideration, 
 should be reminded of Constable's account of it as 
 " almost a history of the defence of Gibraltar." " The 
 distant sea," says this encomiast, "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 if 
 to secure it in his grasp. He seems to say, ' I have 
 you, and will keep you ! ' " 
 
 Other sitters in 1787 were the Duke of York and 
 Mrs. Wells. Sir Joshua would seem to have had no 
 
 more than his usual luck in painting royalty 
 t ers m .^ painting this royal duke, his portrait of 
 ' ' whom was severely censured by Walpole. 
 
 Mrs. Wells was the actress of that name. For the 
 rest, Sir Joshua worked much from models in 1787, and 
 among those entered in his list of sitters are a Black 
 and a Turk. 
 
 The formal impeachment of Hastings took place at 
 the beginning of this year, and Sir Joshua was present 
 
 at the opening of the proceedings in West- 
 
 ^ ' minster Hall. He had painted Hastings and 
 
 f '^ ' Burke ; he was in this year to paint Sheridan 
 
 with the honours of his great summing up 
 
 of the charges against Hastings thick upon 
 him. So little did Sir Joshua give up to party what 
 was meant for mankind that he included Warren 
 
 174 
 
" Muscipula " 
 
 Hastings among his dinner-guests in the same year 
 as that in which Sheridan occupied his painting-chair 
 and enjoyed his genial companionship, accused and 
 accuser alike meeting a welcome in the hospitable 
 house in Leicester Square. 
 
 The pictures exhibited in 1788 by Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 reached the number of seventeen. Fourteen of these 
 were portraits, the remaining three pictures 77. t,-, • 
 being the " Infant Hercules," " A Girl Sleep- ^'^"'ibits 
 ing," and -the girl engraved as "Muscipula." ^ ' 
 This picture is a very weirdly imagining. A child with 
 a mouse-like face carries a mouse in a trap, and with 
 her is a cat. The picture is to the writer of this 
 unlovely and unpleasant, but is so far from being that 
 to all beholders of it that Mr. Pulling writes: "An age 
 which could give us such children as Master Crewe, the 
 Cockburns, Penelope Boothby, and Muscipula, could not 
 have been quite such an artificial age as we are some- 
 times apt to think." If artificial have any connection 
 with artifice, then Muscipula, who is artifice embodied, 
 in no way redeems her age from the charge that has 
 been levelled at it of having been deplorably artificial. 
 
 "The Gleaners" was another fancy picture painted 
 by Sir Joshua Reynolds in 1788. It is a mannered 
 pastoral, the m^in interest attaching to which ^^ 
 
 is that it contains a portrait of the lady who „ 
 
 was afterwards to become the mother of ' 
 
 Edwin Landseer. She is the beautiful girl ' 
 
 with a sheaf of corn on her head who is the central 
 figure of the picture. 
 
 175 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 Admiral Rodney was another hero who sat to Sir 
 Joshua this year. His tense face and meagre figure con- 
 trast markedly with the face and figure of Lord Heathfield. 
 The death of Gainsborough in 1788 cleared all scores 
 between him and Reynolds, and a handsome tribute is 
 paid to him by the surviving painter in the 
 Fmrteenth Fourteenth Discourse. Not that this Dis- 
 ' course is a eulogium of Gainsborough. It 
 has for its subject his merits and defects, 
 "' ' , treated, on the whole, in a temperate spirit 
 and with the knowledge of a master. 
 
 The sitters of 1788 numbered among them the Duke 
 of York and Mrs. Fitzherbert in January. Mrs. Braddyl 
 
 , also sat in that month to Reynolds, and Mrs. 
 Sitteys of 
 
 00 Wells, the actress, sat again. Master Hoare 
 
 ' is one of the May entries — he had been 
 
 painted five years before by Reynolds as a babe in his 
 mother's arms, — and Miss Boothby is entered as sitting 
 in July. The picture of Penelope Boothby, the medi- 
 tative little girl with folded arms and with the wonder- 
 ful cap, is known to all. Mrs. Braddyl's portrait h&ngs 
 at Hertford House. It presents a handsome lady 
 handsomely attired. It was her pleasure to be painted 
 in reverie with cheek resting in her hand — the large 
 hand of a large woman. 
 
 The King's illness in the beginning of 1789 — his first 
 attack of insanity — raised the Regency question, which 
 divided the town, even ladies in society falling into 
 Regency ladies and Pittites, the external mark of the 
 former being Regency caps and ribbons. 
 
 176 
 
An Opinion Disputed 
 
 With the two foremost men of the hour, Rodney and 
 Sheridan, there sat to Reynolds early in 1789 one of the^ 
 foremost women of it, Mrs. Billington, the idolised 
 young singer, gallantly painted by Sir Joshu^ as St. 
 Cecilia with an attendant choir of angels. y 
 
 The Exhibition of 1789 contained two masterpieces 
 
 by Sir Joshua in the portrait of Sheridan and in the 
 
 picture of little Oify Gwatkin as ' ' Simplicity. " 
 
 OfFy was the painter's grandniece, and his . " 
 
 picture of her is by one of his biographers J 
 
 accounted " the most charming of all his ' " 
 
 child-pictures." Little Oify is very pleasing, but she 
 
 yields in charm to the wee child who presents the ' ' Age 
 
 of Innocence," and the picture of whom may be seen in 
 
 the National Gallery in London. This little ,, y,, . 
 
 girl is the flower of maiden childhood. Let ^ t 
 
 ^ ,, , o/Inno- 
 
 any one call to mind the spiritual remoteness .^»,_„ " 
 
 in her face, the sweet withdrawnness of her 
 figure behind her folded hands, and then deny that she 
 is lovelier than intrusive OfFy — for OfFy is the most 
 intrusive of all the little children painted by Sir Joshua- 
 She is in consequence of this the least distinguished, 
 and stands for simples among his children just as the 
 other damsel stands for gentles among them. OfFy 
 is well named "Simplicity," for she is of the family 
 of Miss Mitford's "Lizzy," the little village maiden 
 described in Our Village. Sturdy, round, laughing, 
 sunburnt, rosy, glad, loving, reliant — these are the 
 words that describe her, as they do Lizzy, Pretty, 
 too, she is, but — charming ? The most charming of all 
 
 177 N 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 Sir Joshua's children ? No, little OfFy Gwatkin is not 
 that. 
 
 Among other pictures contributed fay the President to 
 
 the Exhibition of 1789 was " Cymon and Iphigenia." 
 
 It holds the back place in the estimation of 
 
 Cymon ^Qgx&nty that all his mythological pictures 
 andlphi- j^^j^ q^^ ^f ^.j^^j^^^ <,^jjg Continence of 
 gema," gcipio," hangs in the Imperial Gallery at St. 
 Z7°9 Petersburg, and no lover of Reynolds grudges 
 
 the possession of it to the Czar of all the Russias. 
 Another of them hangs in the Corporation Gallery in 
 Glasgow, and , every lover of the Scots would wish to 
 know them possessed of a better Reynolds in the place 
 of it. This picture is named " The Death of Cleopatra." 
 It is a tableau vivant on canvas, and no beholder of 
 it for a moment starts as would the beholder of a 
 Cleopatra painted less inadequately in the act of 
 destroying herself. 
 
 Sir Joshua lost the sight of his left eye in the July 
 of this year, and with this- event his painting career 
 was brought to a close. Among his last sitters was 
 Windham, his picture of whom hangs in the National 
 Portrait Gallery in London. This politician, who, as 
 painted by Sir Joshua, is a foolish-looking man with 
 fine brown eyes, was an Irish secretary of those days. 
 In this picture of him, which is very decorative, his 
 head leans against red curtains, and the face comes 
 out well. 
 
 It is touching and impressive to read of the high 
 fortitude shown by Sir Joshua under the heavy visitation 
 
 178 
 
Birds 
 
 of blindness. His composure would seem to have 
 never forsaken him, except when he found that he 
 vainly tried to regain a flown bird, the solace of his 
 dim hours. He paced Leicester Square for the . 
 
 better part of a morning, unwilling to return "'' /l ^ 
 to his house made desolate by the flight from j i,^^ 
 
 it ofthis little inmate. He was inconsolable for J ^ '"• 
 the loss of it. Birds were very dear to this childless man. 
 He could be as happy as his own little Robinetta with a 
 bird — who does not know the child with a glory of red- 
 gold hair who was painted by him with a bird in a 
 picture which hangs in the National Gallery in London ? 
 — and he could be as sorrowful as his own little Dorinda 
 beside an empty birdcage. All the children painted by 
 him have a marked bird-like quality, with perhaps the 
 exception of OfFy, in whom it is not marked, though it 
 is not entirely absent in her too. She would be less 
 pleasing if it were. • 
 
 Changes of scene now became imperatively necessary, 
 and Sir Joshua visited his friends in the Country, among 
 them Burke at Beaconsfield, twice his host this year. 
 Regarding the second visit Tom Taylor writes: "Within 
 a few days of Sir Joshua's return from Beaconsfield, 
 curiously enough, I find him dining with Hastings." 
 Blind as he had become, Sir Joshua, it is evident, had 
 retained his power of seeing both sides of a question. 
 The monument to Johnson occupied his thoughts in this 
 time of his visitation, and he was, says Boswell, one of 
 " a select number of Dr. Johnson's friends," who met 
 this year at Malone's dinner-table to settle as to effectual 
 
 179 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 measures for having a monument erected to the Doctor 
 in Westminster Abbey. 
 
 Academy labours did not cease to busy Sir Joshua 
 after he had had to set aside his brush, and he this year 
 Aradpntv ^.ttended the meetings relative to the candi- 
 / hnu dature and election of Bonomi, the Italian 
 
 o ' architect, versus that of the English artist 
 Edwards, which set goingthe Academy quarrel 
 that saddened his closing days. Sir Joshua favoured 
 Bonomi for the vacant professorship of perspective, and 
 had to experience the mortification that his giving his 
 casting vote in favour of this candidate did not settle the 
 question of his appointment. 
 
 In spite of deepening blindness and augmenting 
 vexations. Sir Joshua, however, held the tenor of his 
 way as regards entertaining, and the dinner-parties 
 given by him this year were numerous, among those 
 who attended the last one of the year, the list of guests 
 at which is given in his pocket-book, being Boswell and 
 Malone. 
 
 The list of sitters in 1789 is a half-year one, ending 
 
 in July. " From this month," write Leslie and Taylor, 
 
 „. **no entries of sitters occur." The state- 
 
 ment, " Prevented by my eye beginning to 
 
 ' ^ be obscured," is set over against the entry, 
 
 " Miss ," not, as has been asserted, opposite to the 
 
 name of " Lady Beauchamp." The lady whose name 
 is not indicated is thought to have been Miss Russell. 
 She was a child, and Reynolds's portrait of her of this 
 time was in 1865 at Shortgrove in Essex. It is pleasant 
 
 180 
 
" Children " 
 
 to think of the painter of so many children, as at the 
 last engaged on a portrait of a child, and, however the 
 matter stand regarding " Miss — ^," it is to be noted 
 that the last list of sitters to Sir Joshua Reynolds has 
 for its opening and closing entry " Children." 
 
 i8i 
 
CHAPTER XII. 
 
 THE END. 
 [1790-92. J 
 
 In 1790 took place the rupture with the Academy which 
 
 led to Sir Joshua's resignation of the Presidency. With 
 
 r, , . old age and growing infirmities upon him, it 
 
 'fh th taxed the good temper and tact of even Sir 
 
 . , Joshua Reynolds too heavily to keep the 
 
 peace with the artists over whom he pre- 
 
 sided, and when in 1790, in opposition to 
 
 his expressed desire, the painter Fuseli was elected a 
 
 member of the Academy in place of the architect 
 
 Bonomi, he quitted the President's chair in deep 
 
 indignation. 
 
 At the Royal wish he resumed it, but not to retain it 
 for long, for the state of his health obliged him to retire 
 Wft fh f''°'" t^® Academy in the same year, which 
 
 „ . he did in a less hostile spirit, after address- 
 
 Dtscourse, . , , , . . . « 
 
 Oe ember **^^ *° students that characteristically 
 
 _, swelling speech in which he expressed — and 
 
 in expressing it made good — his desire that 
 the last name pronounced by him in the Academy might 
 be the name of Michael Angelo. This farewell forms 
 the close of the Fifteenth (and last) Discourse delivered 
 
 182 
 
3 
 
 "A Delicate Waistcoat" 
 
 ^ December of 1790. In the main it is a review of the 
 pjior Discourses. 
 
 Letters to the Countess of Upper Ossory in the first 
 days of January in 1791 show that the spirit of Sir 
 Joshua was unbroken. The Countess had invited him 
 to Ampthill, her invitation being accompanied by the 
 gift of a waistcoat embroidered by herself. " Such a 
 rough beast with such a delicate waistcoat ! " exclaims 
 the genial painter, having registered a promise: "When 
 I do ware it, I will not take a pinch of snuff that day — I 
 mean, after I have it on." 
 
 The invitation to Ampthill was regretfully declined, 
 the writer explaining that he was "just setting out for 
 Beaconsfield, with an intention to stay there all next 
 week." But the Countess would not take denial, and 
 pressure was not used in vain. From Beaconsfield was 
 written: — "Madam, — Your eloquence is irresistible. 
 I am resolved to set out next Monday, and call on my 
 way at Woburn Abbey, and from thence gladly accept 
 of your Ladyship's kind offer of a conveyance to Ampt- 
 hill." 
 
 Theatricals had been named as the attraction at 
 Ampthill. The painter pleaded his deafness, but added, 
 " I have an eye." A year before this he had written 
 to Sheridan: " There is now an end of the pursuit; the 
 race is over, whether it is won or lost." It was part 
 of his manliness to keep a brave face before women. 
 Thus the new year was begun with a round of 
 visits. 
 
 Sir Joshua now offered his pictures by Old Masters to 
 
 183 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 the Royal Academy at a very moderate charge, and, his 
 
 offer of them not meeting with acceptance, instituted 
 
 the much-discussed Ralph's Exhibition. This was an 
 
 ^^ , exhibition of the pictures having two objects 
 
 4.1. T> » in view — the displaying of them to the 
 the Royal , ,. , .: , , ^ , 
 
 A dfim public at large, thus to be won to purchase 
 
 them, and the benefiting of his servant, 
 
 Ralph Kirkley, to whom were to be given 
 
 the profits of the exhibition. The world is a wag, and 
 
 this wag said (quoting two lines from Hudibras) : — 
 
 " A squire he had whose name was Ralph, 
 Who in the adventures went his half." 
 
 In sitting this year to Breda for his portrait for the 
 Swedish Academy, Sir Joshua Reynolds sat for the last 
 time for his picture. 
 
 With the lapse of months his sight more and more 
 failed him, and though still nominally President of the 
 Royal Academy, he was unable to take the chair, and 
 early in 1792 was obliged to give up the idea of ever 
 painting again. So far he had painted at intervals, 
 using what sight he had in one eye. He was now 
 reduced to — dusting pictures. 
 
 Miss Burney, on visiting him, found him "serious 
 even to sadness," a thing scarce to be wondered at 
 when it is added that she found him with one eye 
 bandaged and the other shaded with a green half- 
 bonnet. 
 
 Death alone could bring relief to a man brought to 
 184 
 
"Hail! and Farewell!" 
 
 this pass, and death was now near. On February 
 the 23rd of the year 1792 Sir Joshua Reynolds passed 
 
 ^"^^y- Death 
 
 "Hail! and Farewell!" wrote Burke, at „, ' 
 
 the end of his eloquent tribute to the dead " 
 
 painter. 
 
 The funeral given to Sir Joshua was one of princely 
 splendour, three dukes and three earls being among the 
 pall-bearers. He was laid to rest in St. Paul's, close to 
 the tomb of Wren, and the tomb of Turner was to be 
 " as close as possible " to his, for so Turner directed. 
 
 The best of happiness, honours, and fortunes had 
 kept with him, and he had raised his family with him- 
 self. The niece who inherited the bulk of his wealth 
 found herself at his death in the possession of a hundred 
 thousand pounds, and thus dowered changed her title of 
 Miss Palmer for that of Marchioness of Thomond. 
 
 Sir Joshua had himself appreciated the lot which had 
 been his through a life which fell but a little short of the 
 allotted term of three-score years and ten. In his own 
 gracious words, he had been fortunate in long good 
 health and constant success, and had no cause to 
 complain, knowing that all things on earth must have 
 an end, and that he was come to his, — brave words from 
 a man from whom hearing and sight had been taken, 
 and who through months had groped in a deepening 
 darkness among the pictures that were wife and children 
 to him. 
 
 185 
 
CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS, THE PAINTER AND THE MAN: 
 AN APPROXIMATION. 
 
 Appreciations of Reynolds have been written, and 
 condemnations of him are being written ; in what 
 follows there is an attempt made at achieving the 
 middle thing between these two. 
 
 First, as regards the painter, a hearing is asked for 
 some of his contemporaries, painters. 
 
 " I see in his pictures," said Romney, " an exquisite 
 charm which I see in nature, but in no other pictures." 
 
 ' ' Damn him ! how various he is ! " said Gainsborough. 
 
 The last-quoted characteristic exclamation is especially 
 well worth bringing under the notice of those — to-day an 
 increasing number — whose comment, in face of the 
 paintings of Reynolds, is: " Bless him ! how same he 
 is!" 
 
 Opie has already been quoted as having said that the 
 faded pictures of Reynolds were finer than those of 
 most other painters in a perfect condition. 
 
 Least of the painters, but not least of the prophets, 
 perhaps, aftiong the contemporaries of Reynolds, James 
 Northcote said of him: " He may go out of fashion for 
 a time, but you must come back to him again." 
 
 1 86 
 
Points of View 
 
 Germans who study art-history with Liibke are told 
 of Reynolds : — 
 
 " He laid the foundation of that brilliant study of 
 colour which has since the eighteenth century become 
 the chief merit of the English School." 
 
 Current opinion in England regarding Reynolds 
 varies. Some hold that at his best his work is un- 
 surpassed in what he himself says " the painters call 
 ' handling.' 1" 
 
 Others assert that he stated the case against himself 
 in the words: "Art has its boundaries though imagina- 
 tion has none." According to them, Reynolds's own 
 imagination had its boundaries, and they terribly 
 narrowed the boundaries of his art. 
 
 Those who have recourse to comparison bring 
 Reynolds into line with Gainsborough, and it is not 
 uncommon to hear it asserted that while Gainsborough 
 was more of a virtuoso than Reynolds, Reynolds was 
 more of an artist than he. 
 
 It is not uninteresting to mark these different points 
 of view. For the rest, it can scarcely be needful to add 
 that to the unreflecting many what has been termed 
 "the grace of Reynolds'' is the dominating feature of 
 his work, and is one which has gained for it an affec- 
 tion that is accorded to the work of no other British 
 master of the past. 
 
 Some consideration must here be given to Reynolds's 
 
 ' This term Reynolds explains as denoting "a lightness of pencil 
 that implies great practice, and gives the appearance of being done 
 with ease." 
 
 187 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 day-by-day way of life as painter. An account of it 
 which, together with one of his study and its appoint- 
 ments, has been transmitted to posterity, has been 
 made the subject of praise in the past, and is being 
 made the subject of censure in the present. Let readers 
 draw their own conclusion. 
 
 " His study," says Allan Cunningham, who here leans 
 on James Northcote, " was octagonal, some twenty feet 
 long, sixteen broad, and about fifteen feet high. The 
 window was small and square, and the sill nine feet 
 from the floor. His sitter's chair moved on castors, 
 and stood above the floor a foot and a half ; he held his 
 palette by a handle, and the sticks of his brushes were 
 eighteen inches long. He wrought standing, and with 
 great celerity. He rose early, breakfasted at nine, 
 entered his study at ten, examined designs or touched 
 unfinished portraits till eleven brought a sitter ; painted 
 till four; then dressed, and gave the evening to 
 company." 
 
 The personal relations of Reynolds with his contem- 
 poraries who were painters — it will sufiice to touch here 
 on the foremost among them — cannot be termed 
 amiable. He obviously returned Gainsborough's dis- 
 like in kind, and that of Wilson and Barry in degree. 
 Not that he openly expressed himself to that eifect, for 
 his conversation would seem to have been uniformly of 
 the character between the lines ascribed to it by Wolcot 
 in his account of a breakfast with " Sir Joshua at his 
 house in Leicester Fields," from which breakfast the 
 satirist carried away remembrance of " some desultory 
 
 i88 
 
A Change of Front 
 
 remarks on the Old Masters, but not one word of the 
 living artists — as on that subject no one could ever 
 obtain his real opinion." The fact that no one could 
 do this sufficiently indicates what his real opinion was. 
 A time came when he did not make a secret of his 
 opinions. He passed publicly strictures on the work of 
 Gainsborough dead — Gainsborough living was not a man 
 whose work it would have been safe to pass strictures 
 on — and in referring publicly to " our own excellent 
 Hogarth," he proceeded to pass a censure on that 
 painter. He admired his work and Gainsborough's, 
 but he could see faults in it, and when he ventured to 
 speak of it he ventured to name these faults. 
 
 Though it is true that the portrait termed by him 
 "the finest in the world" was the work of an Old 
 Master (Velasquez' portrait of Innocent X.), it is not 
 true that he was an undeviating admirer of any one 
 coming under the denomination of Old Master. He is 
 found, on a second inspection of the pictures of Rubens, 
 characterising the colouring of that painter as "com- 
 paratively cold," whereas on a first inspection of his 
 pictures the colouring of them had seemed to him to be 
 of great brilliance. This change of front he explained 
 in a highly interesting manner, according to Sir George 
 Beaumont. 
 
 " When he recollected," says Sir George, " that when 
 he first saw them he had his note-book in his hand, for 
 the purpose of writing down short remarks, he per- 
 ceived what had occasioned their now making a less 
 impression than they had done formerly. By the eye 
 
 189 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 passing immediately from the white paper to the picture 
 the colours derived uncommon freshness and warmth: 
 for want of this foil they afterwards appeared com- 
 paratively cold." 
 
 The "complying and bland" manner whicji so 
 commended Reynolds to Goldsmith has perhaps more 
 than anything else discommended him to others. 
 "Grandeur," he said, "is composed of straight lines; 
 genteelness and elegance, of serpentine lines;" and 
 these words have been very malignly applied to his 
 own way of life. Johnson, without malevolence, de- 
 scribed him to Boswell as the most invulnerable man 
 he knew, and the malevolent through generations have 
 put their own interpretation upon the words. "I go 
 with the great stream of life," said Reynolds, when his 
 life was at the ebb; and scarcely one in a hundred says 
 ungrudgingly, " Happy man was his dole!" 
 
 By temperament inclined to range himself with those 
 whose view of life is that "whatever is, is good," his 
 optimism laid him open to the charge of fatuous com- 
 placence, which his public utterances did a great deal 
 to support, as when, in 1769, he said from the Presi- 
 dential chair: — 
 
 " There are at this time a greater number of excellent 
 artists than were ever known before at one period in 
 this nation; there is a general desire among our nobility 
 to be distinguished as lovers and judges of the arts; 
 there is a greater superfluity of wealth among the 
 people to reward the professors; and, above all, we 
 are patronised by a Monarch who, knowing the value 
 
 190 
 
Public Criticism 
 
 of science and of elegance, thinks every art worthy of 
 his notice that tends to soften and humanise the mind." 
 In his character of a man, described by Goldsmith 
 as " most civilly steering," Reynolds was sparing of his 
 criticism of others, and while this has in great measure 
 not been counted as righteousness unto him, another 
 thing, unquestionably praiseworthy, has met with little 
 praise from those who have concerned themselves with 
 examination of his character. It is that he himself 
 brooked and benefited by criticism of his work, and in 
 especia,l deferred to public opinion in regard to it. It 
 is, some hold, a part of cowardice in the creator of an 
 art-work to do this. Euripides, they say, advanced upon 
 the Athenian stage, and told the spectators who showed 
 displeasure at certain lines in a play of his that he came 
 there to instruct, and not to receive instruction. The 
 denunciators of Reynolds overlook the fact that he fol- 
 lowed the precedent of another Greek, and one who, as 
 a painter, was very fitly taken by him as Exemplar. 
 " I cannot but think," so he expressed himself in one 
 of his memoranda, "that Apelles' method of expos- 
 ing his pictures for public criticism was a vefy good 
 one. I do not know why the judgment of the vulgar, 
 on the mechanical parts of painting, should not be as 
 good as any whatever ; for instance, as to whether such 
 a part be natural or not. If one of these persons should 
 ask why half the face is black, or why there is such 
 a spot of black, or snuff as they call it, under the nose, 
 I should conclude from thence that the shadows are 
 thick or dirtily painted, or that the shadow under the 
 
 191 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 ndse was too much resembling snufF, when, if those 
 shadows had exactly resembled the transparency and 
 colour of nature, they would have no more been taken 
 notice of than the shadow in nature itself." 
 
 It was this deference in Reynolds which underlay 
 those fine manners of his which have passed into a 
 byword. He was not a wit, but the happy reply which 
 borders upon wit rarely failed him at need. Thus, in 
 answer to a nobleman who objected that he had not 
 heard a word of a discourse read by him, he said, with 
 a smile, "That was to my advantage." The pretty 
 blandishment in which he explained his mode of signing 
 a picture of Mrs. Siddons has been recorded elsewhere. 
 He was uniformly urbane to gentlemen and gentle- 
 women. In his intercourse with others he seems to 
 have maintained somewhat of the Chatham bearing, 
 marked by a cold stateliness which impressed those 
 whom it did not please, and pleased those who are 
 pleased to be impressed. 
 
 So little true is it the while that Sir Joshua was the 
 master of etiquette that some would make him out to 
 have been, that it is matter of record that he was once 
 mortified by the cold reception accorded to him by a 
 nobleman who had expressed a great desire to know 
 him, and into whose presence he had hastened. The 
 nobleman had looked no higher than his visitor's feet, 
 and they were not encased in the regulation gear. 
 Hence the cold reception. A rigid stickler for etiquette 
 would not have inflicted the shock which Reynolds in 
 this case inflicted. 
 
 192 
 
Reynolds as Host 
 
 The description of Reynolds as host also belies that 
 view of him according to which he lacked all simplicity. 
 Years before Sydney Smith had pointed out that the 
 thing of main importance in the case of a dinner is 
 not what is on the table, but what is on the chairs, 
 Sir Joshua Reynolds had gathered around his table 
 the great, the good, the gay, and — crowning credit to 
 him! — the dinnerless. The fare was plentiful, but of 
 indifferent quality ; and the attendance was to match, 
 "The wine, cookery, and dishes were but little attended 
 to; nor was the fish or venison ever talked of or recom- 
 mended," so writes one who writes further, ",At five 
 o'clock precisely dinner was served, whether all the 
 invited guests were arrived or not. Sir Joshua was 
 never so fashionably ill-bred as to wait an hour perhaps 
 for two or three persons of rank or title." It has to be 
 added that Miss Reynolds presided at these dinners, and 
 that women — the pretty and the witty— helped to make 
 what is described (by Courtenay, quoted by Allan Cun- 
 ningham) as "the hilarity and singular pleasure" of 
 them. 
 
 This is the place in which to say that the ugly vice of 
 avarice has been laid to the charge of Reynolds, though 
 it is matter of proven fact that he was a generous 
 donor, lender, and purchaser. To a young Dutch 
 painter of the name of De Gree, unknown and poor in 
 London, he gave fifty guineas. This donation on his 
 part was one of many similar. Johnson, on his death- 
 bed, addressed three requests to him, of which the 
 second one was, *' Forgive me thirty pounds which I 
 
 193 o 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 borrowed from you ;" and he was forgiven them. Being 
 desirous of purchasing Gainsborough's "Girl and Pigs," 
 he gave a hundred guineas for the picture, the price 
 asked for which was sixty guineas. It is, to say the 
 least, unusual for a miser to have such a record. An 
 acquaintance including many candid friends is almost 
 unanimous in its praise of him as generous and hos' 
 pitable, and the charge of avarice rests mainly on the 
 character given him by his servants, by whom he is 
 represented as having been "prudent in the matter of 
 pins — a saver of bits of thread — a man hard and parsi- 
 monious, who never thought he had enough of labour 
 out of his dependants, and always suspected that he 
 overpaid them." Allan Cunningham, who is the 
 authority for this, explains that with it coincides the 
 public opinion of his time of Sir Joshua Reynolds, 
 according to which he was close, cold, cautious, and 
 sordid; while "on the other side," so this biographer 
 is careful to add, "we have the open testimony of 
 Burke, Malone, Boswell, and Johnson, who all repre- 
 sent him as generous, open-hearted, and humane." It 
 is conceivable that a bachelor living with a maiden- 
 sister should with the lapse of years have formed that 
 affection for things trivial which, in so far as it marks 
 bachelors and maids, brings them the nearer to the 
 maiden goddess Diana under her name of Trivia, and 
 may be viewed with smiling eyes. For the rest, we 
 have seen Sir Joshua represented as generous by men 
 severally Irish, Scots, and English. It remains to 
 sound the opinion of women here. A man agmnst 
 
 194 
 
The Charge of Avarice 
 
 whom the charge of meanness can be tenably levelled is 
 unforgiven of women, be his virtues in other directions 
 what they will. Such a man is dismissed as "not a 
 gentleman," and, from the queen's scullery-maid to the 
 queen, goes bare of favour. Sir Joshua Reynolds was 
 not such a man. In her charming account of the 
 Academy Exhibition of 1770, Mary Moser, R.A., writing 
 to Fuseli, makes mention of a signal act of generosity 
 on the part of the President, and adds, " He is a 
 gentleman ! " 
 
 So a woman says of a man that he is generous. 
 
 It is not here said of Sir Joshua that he was generous 
 in a superlative degree — the man who is that will never 
 need championship of the kind here undertaken, — and the 
 following oddly conflicting account of him as a donor of 
 pictures is cited without explanation being offered. 
 
 "The painter," says Leslie, "was somewhat chary of 
 making presents of his pictures. He used to say he 
 found they were seldom highly valued unless paid for." 
 
 Says Mr. Algernon Graves: "A'striking and pleasant 
 trait in Sir Joshua Reynolds's character was his gene- 
 rosity with regard to portraits of himself. In the two 
 volumes of the ledgers now in my possession, there is 
 not a single instance recorded of a payment for one of 
 them, yet there must be nearly a hundred in existence. 
 He seems to have presented them to his friends, and to 
 those for whom he painted many family portraits." 
 
 It was an amiable trait in Sir Joshua to paint so often 
 a person whose appearance can have delighted him so 
 little as his own. In stature he was below the middle 
 
 19s 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 size, his features were blunt and round, his mouth was 
 mutilated, his face was pitted with small-pox. He made 
 the best of all this without ever falling into the error of 
 making a Mr. Prettyman of himself. 
 
 And he did not only on canvas make the best of all 
 this, but he continued in its despite, and in despite of 
 his deafness, to make himself a social favourite, escaping 
 through the sweetness of his nature the two extremes 
 into which the unbeautiful and the afflicted are apt to 
 fall, that of churlishness and personal negligence. In 
 especial does he, as regards the cheerfulness with which 
 he bore his deafness, stand out in delightful contrast 
 with most persons subject to this malady. 
 
 The charge of intemperance brought against Sir 
 Joshua is more difficult to deal with than most ef the 
 others in the foregoing enumerated. In the matter of 
 snuflF-taking, the present writer gives it against him. 
 Sir Joshua unquestionably took this stimulant to ex- 
 cess. The recording angel who had pity upon the 
 weakness of Tristram Shandy's Uncle Toby may pos- 
 sibly have reserved indulgence for the weakness of the 
 Uncle Joshua of two generations of OfFys. One would 
 not like to say how many weiistcoats he spoilt by his 
 excessive love of snuff, and it being remembered that 
 he did not keep his promise regarding the Sabbath 
 made to Dr. Johnson, the terrible thought lies near 
 that he did not keep his promise regarding snufF made 
 to the Countess of Ossory. 
 
 Pride of a sort — to particularise the sort, carriage- 
 pride — was also undeniably of the number of Sir Joshua 
 
 196 
 
The Showy Carriage 
 
 Reynolds's sins. What follows is the unvarnished 
 truth. On removing to Leicester Square, he set up 
 a carriage, and, lest it should be confounded with " an 
 apothecary's carriage " (his own words), he had it pro- 
 vided with wheels carved and gilt, and with panels 
 having the four seasons of the year painted upon them. 
 His sister said that it was too showy, and his coachman 
 showed it for money. It was a carriage the owner of 
 which, it is safe to assume, could never forget he had 
 it; in this respect unlike his contemporary Hogarth, of 
 whom it is related that, having called one day on Lord 
 Mayor Beckford, he went out at a wrong door, forgot 
 that he had a carriage, and after seeking in vain for a 
 hackney coach, returned home wet to the skin. That is 
 a very pretty story; but it shows the hero of it to have 
 been a thing apart. Sir Joshua Reynolds — this is 
 almost the worst that can be said of him — was not a 
 thing apart. 
 
 Not a few ground their scorn of Reynolds on his lack 
 of humour ; but the lack of humour is a human in^- 
 firmity as common as the lack of hearing, and to scorn 
 Sir Joshua on this ground is as reprehensible as it would 
 be to scorn him on the ground of his deafness. This is 
 the aspect of his case which should be put forward, and 
 they err who claim for him what he had not, a fine sense 
 of the risible. Mr. Pulling gives high praise to two 
 imaginary dialogues by him in which he undertook to 
 give a humorous presentment of Johnson, but only an 
 eye so friendly as to be a flatterer's could see matter for 
 high praise in them. Reynolds himself is said to have 
 
 197 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 made a statement to Northcote to the effect that, had 
 he been so minded, he had had it in him to paint "with 
 much humour and spirit;" but that statement must be 
 taken with the reserve which is due to a man's appr^se- 
 ment of himself under whatsoever aspect, and in especial 
 under the aspect of his scope of humour and spirit. 
 
 To read the Discourses is to discover that the 
 singularity of the Georgian dress was manifest to 
 Reynolds, but that he would not have you think he 
 laughed at it, for that would stamp him a barbarian. 
 " If an European," said he, "when he has cut off his 
 beard, and put false hair on his head, or bound up his 
 own natural hair in regular hard knots, as unlike nature 
 as he can possibly make it ; and after having rendered 
 them immovable by the help of the fat of hogs, has 
 covered the whole with flour, laid on by a machine with 
 the utmost regularity; if, when thus attired, he issues 
 forth and meets a Cherokee Indian, who has bestowed 
 as much time at his toilet, and laid on, with equal care 
 and attention, his yellow and red ochre on particular 
 parts of his forehead or cheeks, as he judges most 
 becoming ; whoever of these two despises the other for 
 this attention to the fashion of his country, whichever 
 first feels himself provoked to laugh, is the barbarian." 
 
 Rightly put, the case of those two is, rather, that 
 whichever first feels himself provoked to laugh is the 
 humorist. TRat being said, it must in verity be added 
 that Sir Joshua Reynolds was by nature as grave as a 
 Cherokee Indian and as little as he a humorist. 
 
 Not that on that account he is to be set on the same 
 198 
 
Letters to the "Idler" 
 
 mental plane as the Indian. He is by so much 
 superior to him as he used yellow and red ochre with 
 incomparably more pleasing results, as he wrote those 
 edifying letters contributed to the Idler, as he wrote the 
 no less edifying letter addressed to poor Barry, and as 
 he wrote the really charming letter to the Countess 
 of Ossory. That to the Countess may be read in its 
 entirety ; so should be that to Barry (both are given by 
 Leslie and Taylor) ; three extracts from the letters to the 
 Idler are given here : — 
 
 "A horse is said to be a beautiful animal ; but had a 
 horse as few good qualities as a tortoise, I do not 
 imagine that he would then be deemed beautiful." 
 
 " If a man, born blind, were to recover his sight, and 
 the most beautiful woman were brought before him, he 
 could not determine whether she was handsome or not ; 
 nor if the most beautiful and most deformed were pro- 
 duced, could he any better determine to which he should 
 give the preference, having seen only those two." 
 
 " I have seen figures by Michel Angelo, of which it 
 was very difficult to determine whether they were in the 
 highest degree sublime or extremely ridiculous." ^ 
 
 Those who accord unqualified admiration to Reynolds 
 largely emphasise what they assume must have been 
 his love of children, so often and so lovingly painted by 
 him. There is a lamentable story that the little children 
 of the poor who sat to him said witk sad iteration, 
 
 ' In this expression regarding the sublime and the ridiculous, Sir 
 Joshua has well the start in time of Napoleon (and of Thomas Paine). 
 
 199 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 "Sir, I'm tired!" It was the cry of the children to 
 deaf ears, and the painter is not the more to be for- 
 given than that to read a certain paper in the Spectator 
 is to see a description of him in the person of Mr. Iron- 
 side, the old bachelor supposed to narrate what follows; 
 
 " I went the other day to visit Eliza, who, in the 
 perfect bloom of beauty, is the mother of several 
 children. She had a little prating girl upon her lap, 
 who was begging to be very fine, that she might 
 go abroad; and the indulgent mother, at her little 
 daughter's request, had just taken the knots off her 
 own head to adorn the hair of the pretty trifler. A 
 smiling boy was at the same time caressing a lap-dog, 
 which is their mother's favourite, because it pleases the 
 children; and she, with a delight in her looks which 
 heightened her beauty, so divided her conversation 
 with the two pretty prattlers, as to make them both 
 equally cheerful. 
 
 " As I came in, she said with a blush, ' Mr. Ironside, 
 though you are an old bachelor, you must not laugh 
 at my tenderness to my children.' I need not tell my 
 reader what civil things I said in answer to the lady, 
 whose matron-like behaviour gave me infinite satis- 
 faction: since I myself take great pleasure in playing 
 with* children, and am seldom unprovided of plums 
 or marbles, to make my court to such entertaining 
 companions." 
 
 Are not the children painted by Sir Joshua at his 
 best the children of this Eliza, little girls very fine, 
 with knots in their hair — pretty triflers — smiling boys 
 
Summing up 
 
 —with them the lap-dog ? Is not the mother with them 
 a mother in the perfect bloom of beauty ? What other 
 children — what other mothers — has Reynolds painted 
 with love ? 
 
 Our thanks to him for what he has done and done 
 most graciously, but let there be no mistake here. 
 Men have loved children more than he did. His heart 
 was not primarily filled with love — else we should not 
 so easily imagine the civil things he said to the lady 
 who apologised to him for her tenderness to her children. 
 The best that can be said of his heart is that he kept it 
 clean within him, and that, by a beautiful working of 
 this, his work in art, if not as sweet and healthy as a 
 good year's cornfield, is at least free from those three 
 terrible diseases which visit corn, and not it alone — 
 blight, mildew, and smut. 
 
 We have to thank him for that. 
 
 20I 
 
Appendices. 
 
 I. Chronology of the Life of Sir Joshua 
 Reynolds. 
 
 II. Reynolds's Pictures in Public Galleries in 
 London. 
 
 III. Engravings of Reynolds's Paintings. 
 
 IV. Bibliography. 
 V. Index. 
 
 203 
 
I. 
 
 Chronology of the Life of Sir 
 Joshua Reynolds. 
 
 1723. — Bom at Plympton, in Devonshire. 
 
 1740. — Bound apprentice to Hudson in London. 
 
 1742.— Dismissed by Hudson. Returns to Devon, where he 
 paints portraits. 
 
 1745. — In London again. 
 
 1746. — Recalled to Devonshire to his dying father. 
 
 1747. — Takes a house at Plymouth Dock. 
 
 1749. — Introduced to Commodore Keppel. Sails with him to the 
 Mediterranean, visiting Lisbon, Cadiz, Gibraltar, Algiers, 
 Minorca. At Minorca paints many portraits, and meets 
 with accident to his lip. Proceeds to Leghorn, and thence 
 to Rome. 
 
 1751. — Deafness, result of chill caught in the Vatican. 
 
 1752. — Leaves Rome, having spent two years there. Spends 
 two months at Florence, and visits other Italian cities, 
 returning to England through France after sojourn of a 
 month in Paris. 
 
 1753. — Health impaired. Spends three months in Devonshire. 
 Returns to London. Takes apartments in St. Martin's 
 Lane with his sister Frances; then (same year) removes 
 to Newport Street. Paints first picture of Admiral Keppel. 
 
 1754. — Becomes acquainted with Johnson. 
 
 I7S7' — First portrait of Johnson. 
 
 1760.— First Exhibition in the Strand. Reynolds removes to 
 Leicester Square. 
 
 205 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 1 761. — Portrait of Sterne. Acquaintance with Goldsmith begun. 
 1762. — Portrait of Garrick between Tragedy and Comedy. 
 
 Visit to Devonshire with Johnson. Northcote first sees 
 
 Reynolds. 
 1764. — Literary Club established. 
 1768. — Royal Academy founded, and Reynolds elected first 
 
 President. 
 1769. — Knighted. First of the Discourses on Art delivered 
 
 at the Royal Academy. 
 1770. — Portrait of Goldsmith exhibited. 
 1773. — Made D.C.L. of Oxford, and Mayor of Plympton. 
 
 " Lady Cockbum and her Children " painted. 
 1776. — "The Marlborough Family" picture. 
 1 781. — First tour in Low Countries. 
 1782. — Paralytic stroke. 
 1783. — Second visit to Low Countries. Picture of "Mrs. 
 
 Siddons as the Tragic Muse." 
 1784. — Succeeds Allan Ramsay as painter-in-ordinary to 
 
 George II L 
 1786.— "Angels' Heads" painted. 
 1789. — Blindness threatened. 
 1790. — Rupture with the Royal Academy. 
 1792.— Death and burial in St. Paul's Cathedral. 
 
 206 
 
II. 
 
 Reynolds's Pictures in Public 
 Galleries in London. 
 
 To make this work of use to the visitor to the great public 
 galleries in London, I have drawn up the following list of 
 Reynolds's pictures to be seen there, with a reference to the 
 account of them contained herein. The galleries dealt with 
 are: — 
 
 I. The National Gallery. 
 II. The National Portrait Gallery. 
 
 III. The South Kensington Museum. 
 
 IV. The Wallace Collection. 
 V. The Dulwich Gallery. 
 
 The National Gallery. 
 No. of East Vestibule. 
 
 Picture. 
 
 143. Lord Ligonier: hero of Laffeldt in 1747, when he led the 
 
 British charge of the French. See p. 58. 
 681. Captain Orme: a soldier of American campaign fame. 
 
 See p. 59. 
 
 Rooms XVI. and XVII. 
 
 (The British Old Masters.) 
 
 79. Three Ladies decorating a Statue of Hymen : the Misses 
 Montgomery, who by marriage became severally the 
 Hon. Mrs. Gardiner, mother of the Earl of Blessington, 
 the Marchioness Townshend, and Mrs. Beresford. See 
 pp. 120-124. 
 
 207 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 No. of 
 Picture. 
 
 io6. A Man's Head : possibly a study for Ugolino. See p. 104. 
 107. The Banished Lord : name of picture as engraved. Also 
 
 possibly a study for Ugolino. See pp. 104, 105. 
 III. Lord Heathfield: hero of Gibraltar. See pp. 11, I73i 176- 
 162. The Infant Samuel. See p. 130. 
 182. Heads of Angels: fancy portrait of Frances Gordon. 
 
 See p. 17a 
 
 305. Sir Abraham Hume: scholar and connoisseur. One of 
 the founders of the Geological Society. See pp. iS4i 'SS- 
 
 306. Portrait of himself. See pp. 15, 16. 
 
 307. The Age of Innocence. See p. 177. 
 
 754. Portraits of Two Gentlemen. See p. 136. 
 
 885. The Snake in the Grass. See p. 163. 
 
 886. Admiral Keppel s painted 1780. See pp. 37) 3^- 
 
 887. Dr. Samuel Johnson. See p. 46. 
 
 888. James Boswell. See p. 164. 
 
 889. His own Portrait. See pp. 15, 16. 
 
 890. George IV. as Prince of Wales. See p. 143. 
 
 891. Portrait of a Lady.^ 
 
 892. Robinetta. See p. 179. 
 
 1259. Anne, Countess of Albemarle: mother of Admiral 
 Keppel. See p. 48. 
 
 The National Portrait Gallery. 
 
 Lord Ashburton (John Dunning). See p. 86. 
 Lord Bath (William Pulteney). See p. 60. 
 Sir William Blackstone. See p. 87. 
 Admiral Boscawen. See p. 35. 
 Edmund Burke. See p. 83. 
 Sir William Chambers, R,A, See p. 83. 
 Cumberland (of CuIIoden), See p. 50. 
 Sir William Hamilton. See pp. 135, 136. 
 Admiral Keppel. See pp. 37, 38. 
 
 William, Earl of Shelburne, afterwards (first) Marquess of 
 Lansdowne. See p. 63. 
 
 ' There is no account of this picture in the body of this book. It 
 presents a calm, pale, handsome Englishwoman very becomingly wigged. 
 The child that peers over her shoulder is a little gnome. 
 
 aoS 
 
Appendix II. 
 
 Reynolds, J. (two portraits of himself)- See p. i6. 
 Edmond Malone. See p. 53. 
 William Windham. See p. 178. 
 
 Besides these paintings by Sir Joshua Reynolds, there are in 
 the National Portrait Gallery the following portraits of indirect 
 interest in connection with him : — 
 
 Earl Camden, the Lord Chancellpr, who died in 1794. (Copy 
 
 from Sir Joshua.) 
 Goldsmith, painted by a pupil of Sir Joshua. 
 James Macpherson (an early copy from the painting by Sir 
 
 Joshua). 
 Rockingham (the statesman, who died in 1782). This picture 
 
 is described as painted in the school of Sir Joshua Reynolds. 
 Thomas Seeker (the Archbishop). An early copy after Sir 
 
 Joshua Reynolds. 
 
 No. of The South Kensington Museum. 
 
 Picture, 
 
 496 (83). Portrait of Mrs. Thomas Whetham, See p. 48. 
 223 (81). Portrait of a Lady. "Attributed to" Sir Joshua 
 Reynolds. 
 
 The Wallace Collection, Hertford House. 
 
 Gallery I. 
 
 561. Portrait of the Duke of Queensberry. Wordsworth's 
 "degenerate Douglas." "Old Q." of infamous memory. 
 See p. 54. 
 
 Gallery XVI. 
 
 31. Lady Elizabeth Seymour, daughter of Francis, first Mar- 
 quis of Hertford. See p. 151. 
 
 32. Mrs. Richard Hoare with her Infant Son. See p. 155. 
 
 33. Lady Frances Seymour, Countess of Lincoln. Elder sister 
 of Lady Elizabeth Seymour. See p. 151. 
 
 35. Mrs. Carnac. See pp. 139, 211. 
 
 36. Miss Bowles. (" Love me, love my dog.") See p. 129. 
 38. Nelly O'Brien. See p. 58. 
 
 209 P 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 No. of 
 Fictare. 
 
 40. The Strawberry Girl. See p. 119. 
 
 43. Mrs. Nesbitt with a Dove.' 
 
 45. Mrs. Robinson (Perdita). See p. 161. 
 
 47. Portrait of Mrs. Braddyll. See p. 176. 
 
 48. St. John the Baptist in the Wilderness. See p. iii. 
 
 DuLwicH Gallery. 
 
 102 (143). A Mother and her Sick Child. (Mother, Child, Angel.) 
 
 See p. 51. 
 104 (146). Portrait of himself. See p. 16. 
 223 (285). The Prophet Samuel. See pp. 130, i;6. 
 318 (340). Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse. See p. 156. 
 333 (138). A Sketch. Subject : A bare-headed knight in 
 
 armour, mounted on a grey horse, prances. 
 
 ' There is no reference to this picture in the body of this book. To 
 the handsome face of Mrs. Nesbitt is given admirable relief by the blue, 
 clouded background. The lady carries a dove, but neither her nor its 
 expression is noticeably.dove-like, the portrait in this respect contrasting 
 strongly with the well-known one of Kitty Fisher with a dove ; for 
 Kitty is as dove-like as the dove she holds, and it is as dove-like as 
 a dove can be. There is somewhat of a shrug, too, in Mrs. Nesbitt's 
 pose (which, however, is charming), whereas £jtty sits at ease — such 
 ease ! 
 
 2 1.0 
 
III. 
 
 Engravings of Reynolds's Paintings. 
 
 Horace Walpole, writing in 1770 on the art-exhibition 
 mania of the day, says : "Another rage is for prints of English 
 portraits. I have been collecting these for thirty years, and 
 originally never gave for a mezzotinto above one or two shillings. 
 The lowest are now a crown; most from half-a-guinea to a 
 guinea." 
 
 Cosmo Monkhouse, writing more than a hundred years later, 
 makes this statement : " About seven hundred plates have been 
 engraved after Reynolds by McArdell, J. R. Smith, V. Green, 
 J. Watson, T. Watson, E. Fisher, J. Dixon, R. Houston, W. 
 Dickinson, J. Jones, G. Marchi, W. Sharp, S. Cousins, and 
 others. Fine and rare proofs of these now fetch very large 
 prices, in some cases exceeding those obtained by Reynolds for 
 the pictures." 
 
 Writing yet more recently, the contributor to the Connoisseur 
 of September 1901 of the article headed " In the Sale-room," 
 makes the following communication: — "The craze for engrav- 
 ings, both in colour and in mezzotint, was on the increase 
 throughout last season. . . . For some reason or other the 
 portraits after Sir Joshua Reynolds seem to be in special 
 demand. . . ." 
 
 Instances of the enormous prices fetched by these are given, 
 the record being established, it is said, " on April 30th [1901], 
 when a first-published plate of ' Mrs. Carnac,' whole length, by 
 J. R. Smith, fetched 1600 guineas (Agnew)." 
 
 In an article on " Colour Prints," contributed by Frank T. 
 
 211 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 Sabin to the same journal, may be read: " Stipple prints after 
 Reynolds comprise some of the best examples of the art, as well 
 as some of the most refined and beautiful subjects." Among 
 those which the writer proceeds to enumerate are several by 
 Schiavonetti, one by Knight, one by Dickinson, and one by 
 Hayward. Hayward's is a large stipple of " Mrs. Siddons as 
 the Tragic Muse," and Dickinson's is a " Mrs. Robinson," 
 described as very rare and very valuable. 
 
 It is pleasant to find a lady named by Mr. Sabin as con- 
 tributing to the best examples of the art of stippling applied to 
 the work of Sir Joshua Reynolds. "The Hon. Mrs. Stanhope 
 (Contemplation)," he writes, " a fine piece of delicate stippling 
 by Caroline Watson, is very rare in colours."' 
 
 Besides the colour-prints presenting women and children, 
 "there are," says Mr. Sabin, "a few fine portraits of men, 
 which were not usually printed in colour." ; 
 
 A charming colour-print of Sir Joshua's portrait of the 
 Countess Spencer, the work of Bartolozzi, accompanies Mr. 
 Sabin's letterpress. The Countess is a rosy-cheeked, blue-eyed 
 girl, very simply attired in white, with a large plain white hat 
 round which is a riband of blue. She might be a pretty milk- 
 maid instead of a high-bom lady the roses in whose cheeks are 
 red with the blood of the Stewarts mixed with the blood of the 
 Sarsfields. 
 
 The fine engravers of the eighteenth century native to the 
 British islands had to make the best of a strong foreign com- 
 petition. The young Italian, Giuseppe Marchi, brought by Sir 
 Joshua Reynolds to England in 1752, who became his first 
 pupil, did not succeed as a painter, though he at least twice 
 achieved exhibition (in " Kit-Kats "), but he became an admired 
 engraver. When Goldsmith, in 1770, wrote that he was sending 
 " his friends over the Shannon " some mezzotint prints of him- 
 self, he referred, it is stated, to Marchi's print from Sir Joshua's 
 picture of him. 
 
 The unsuccessful painters who achieved success as engravers 
 were many in number, and included among them the eminent 
 Hogarth, whose paintings were so little appreciated in his life- 
 
 ' This lady's engraving of Reynolds's portrait of himself, in the Dul- 
 wich Gallery, is given in Malone's Lift of Sir Joshua Reynolds. 
 
Appendix III. 
 
 time that he was compelled to change the brush for the burin, 
 and made by his engravings what he could not make by his 
 paintings — the means of living. 
 
 It was an age in which engravers commanded the highest 
 esteem. Thus, in the great days of "Slaughter's," he who 
 named the prominent members of that coffee-house named 
 with them Sullivan and McArdell. Their names point suffi- 
 ciently to the Irish nationality of these men. In handsome 
 appreciation of the mezzotint reproductions of his paintings by 
 McArdell, Sir Joshua Reynolds declared that immortality would 
 be his through them. Edward Fisher, who produced the first 
 print of " Garrick between Tragedy and Comedy," was another 
 Irish mezzotinter, most of whose engravings are described as 
 having been from portraits by Reynolds. ' 
 
 Special mention must here be given to Robert Strange, who 
 protested against the law (subsequently altered) which excluded 
 engravers from the rank of Academicians. Sir Robert — to give 
 him his title — died in the same year as Sir Joshua, and, having 
 been bom in 1721, his life, it will be seen, fell within much the 
 same dates as that of the painter. 
 
 A namesake of Sir Joshua's among the engravers — Reynolds 
 —■between the years 1820 and 1826, published in several volumes 
 a series of plates of all the works of Sir Joshua then accessible. 
 This Reynolds claimed relationship with the painter. 
 
 Engraved pictures generally, it seems, received catch-penny 
 names. Thus the engraving called "The Banished Lord'' has 
 for its original a painting which hangs to-day in the National 
 Gallery in London, and which is thought to be a study by Sir 
 Joshua for Count Ugolino. In like manner, the engraving 
 named "Resignation" was the reproduction of a painting of 
 the beggar who sat for Ugolino. This engraving was dedicated 
 to Goldsmith with a quotation from the " Deserted Village," which 
 had been dedicated to Sir Joshua Reynolds. The quotation 
 was from the passage descriptive of an old man who 
 
 ,, " Sinks to the grave with unperceiv'd decay. 
 
 While Resignation gently points the way." 
 
 ' Vide Mtmorials of an Eighteenth Century Painter, by Stephen 
 Gwynn. 
 
 213 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 Edward Hamilton's Catalogue Rcdsonni of the Engraved 
 Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds may be studied with advantage 
 in this connection, and a visit to the British Museum, where 
 the finest engravings of Sir Joshua's works may be inspected, 
 will be found fraught with profit and delight. 
 
 214 
 
IV. 
 
 Bibliography, 
 
 The sources of information regarding Reynolds are many, 
 beginning with the admirable articles devoted to him in all the 
 leading Encyclopasdias, the Dictionary of National Biography, 
 and those works dedicated to the History of Fainting and to 
 the History of Painters. In what follows there is enumeration 
 made of some books and articles, here quoted in the order 
 of publication, which have been found profitable reading by 
 students of Reynolds's work. 
 
 1796. — An Authentic History of the Professors of Painting 
 
 in Ireland, involving original letters from Sir Joshua 
 
 Reynolds which prove him to have been illiterate. A. 
 
 Pasquin (pseud.). 
 i797.-^The Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds, to which is prefixed 
 
 an account of the Life and Writings of the Author, by 
 
 Edmond Malone. 
 1798. — The Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds, second edition. 
 
 There is a copy in the British Museum with copious MS. 
 
 notes by William Blake. 
 1813. — Memoirs of Sir Joshua Reynolds, by James Northcote, 
 
 R.A. 
 1819. — Memoirs of the Life of Sir Joshua Reynolds, with some 
 
 Observations on his Talents and Character, by J. Faring- 
 
 ton. 
 1824.— The Complete Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds, with an 
 
 Original Memoir and Anecdotes of the Author. 
 1^2^23.— Reynolds in " Lives of Most Famous British Painters, 
 
 Sculptors, and Architects," by Allan Cunningham. 
 
 215 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 1835.— The Literary Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds, with a 
 
 Memoir of the Author, by W. Beechey, R. A. 
 1856. — Sir Joshua Reynolds and his Works : Gleanings from his 
 
 Diary, unpublished MSS., and from other sources, by 
 
 W. Cotton, edited by J. Burnet. 
 1857. — A Catalogue of the Portraits painted by Sir J. Reynolds, 
 
 by W. Cotton. 
 1859. — Sir Joshua Reynolds's Notes and Observations on 
 
 Pictures, chiefly of the Venetian School, being extracts 
 
 from his Italian sketch-books ; also the Rev. W. Mason's 
 
 observations on Sir Joshua's Method of Colouring. And 
 
 some unpublished Letters of Dr. Johnson, Malone, and 
 
 others. With an Appendix containing a transcript of Sir 
 
 Joshua's Account-book. Edited by W. Cotton. 
 1859.— Some Account of the Ancient Borough Town of Plymp- 
 
 ton St. Maurice or Plympton Earl, with Memoirs of the 
 
 Reynolds Family, by W. Cotton, F.S.A., of Ivybridge. 
 1865. — Sir Joshua Reynolds and his Works. Gleanings from his 
 
 Diary, unpublished Manuscripts, and from other sources. 
 
 Commenced by Charles Robert Leslie, R.A.; continued and 
 
 concluded by Tom Taylor, M.A. 
 1866. — Quarterly Review for April and July. 
 1866. — Redgrave's "Century of Painters." 
 1867. — English Children as painted by Sir J. Reynolds, by 
 
 F. G. Stephens. 
 1874.— Sir Joshua Reynolds as Portrait Painter, by J. C, 
 
 Collins. 
 1874. — A Catalogue Raisonnd of the Engraved Works of Sir 
 
 J. Reynolds, from 1755-1820, by E. Hamilton. 
 1886.— Life of Sir J. Reynolds, by F. S. Pulling. 
 1886. — Artistic Development of Reynolds and Gainsborough, by 
 
 W. M. Conway. 
 1887. — Sir Joshua Reynolds's Discourses, edited, with an 
 
 Introduction, by Helen Zimmem. 
 1894. — Sir Joshua Reynolds, with 9 Illustrations from Pictures 
 
 by the Master, by C. Phillips. 
 1899.— The History of the Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds, 
 
 P.R.A., by Algernon Graves. 
 1900.— Sir Joshua Reynolds, First President of the Royal 
 
 Academy, by Sir Walter Armstrong. 
 216 
 
Appendix IV. 
 
 The Boswellian part played by Northcote in the life of 
 Reynolds invests the following books with an interest of reflex 
 action on Sir Joshua : — 
 
 1830. — William Hazlitt's " Conversations with James North- 
 cote"; re-issued in 1894 under the editorship of Edmund 
 Gosse. 
 
 1898. — Memorials of an Eighteenth Century Painter (James 
 Northcote), by Stephen Gwynn. 
 
 1901. — Conversations of James Northcote, R.A., with James 
 Ward, edited by E. Fletcher. 
 
 These three books abound in references to Sir Joshua. 
 Hazlitt's is a classic, to the value and exquisiteness of which it 
 is needless to draw attention. Mr. Gwynn's " Memorials " is 
 delightful and instructive reading. In them Northcote's account 
 of the Academy quarrel is given in full, as is also his estimate 
 (for good and ill) of Sir Joshua Reynolds; and there is some 
 important matter on the subject of the Discourses, as diversely 
 believed (says Northcote) to have been the composition of 
 Johnson and of Burke ; Malone is not named in this con- 
 nection. 
 
 Mr. Fletcher's book, which is painstaking and useful, has a 
 good index, a glance at which will show how frequently Sir 
 Joshua Reynolds was the subject of the conversations retailed. 
 
 217 
 
Index. 
 
 Abercokn, Marquis of, lo 
 Abington, Mrs., 63, 66, 73, 85, 
 
 86, 112, 113, 115, 116, 122, 
 
 151, 153, 158, 167 
 Academy, Royal, 15, 29, 45, 56, 
 
 75, 79, 8l, 82, 85, 86, 87, 88, 
 
 112, 113, 145, 180, 182, 184, 
 
 206, 217 
 Acre, hero of, 49 
 Adhemar, Count d', 165 
 Affectation, loi 
 
 "Age of Innocence,'' 177,208 
 Agesilajis, 98 
 Agnes, St., Mrs. Quarrington as, 
 
 117 
 Albemarle, Lord, 68 
 
 Lady, 48, 53 
 
 Algiers, 22 
 
 Allegorising, 99 
 
 Amelia, Princess, 60 
 
 America, 35, 128 
 
 Amherst, Sir G., 80 
 
 Ampthill, 183 
 
 Antedates of Painting, 106, 108 
 
 "Angels' Heads," 163, 170, 171, 
 
 206 
 Anson, 11, 34, 35 
 Antwerp, 149, 154 
 Apelles, 191 
 Appreciations, 186 
 Ariosto, 135 
 Armstrong, Dr., 36 
 Art-criticism, 159 
 
 Ashburton, Lord, 86, 87, 153, 
 
 208 
 Auchinleck, 164 
 Augusta, Princess, 61 
 
 Bacchus, Master Herbert as, 131 
 
 Bacelli, La, 154 
 
 Bacon, 102 
 
 Baddeley, Mrs., 1 12, 115, 116 
 
 Bagshot, 147 
 
 Baker, 61, III 
 
 Baldwin, Mrs. ("The Fair 
 
 Greek"), 152 
 Bampfylde, Mr., 136 
 " Banished Lord, The,'' 104, 208, 
 
 213 
 Banks, Sir J., 116, 120 
 Barbary, 22 
 Baretti, 44, 126 
 Barnard, Dr., 21 
 Barre, Isaac, 69, 104 
 Barrington, Admiral, 143 
 Barry, J., 65, 66, 83, 125, 148, 
 
 188, 199 
 Barry, Sjjranger, 49, 52 
 Bartolozzi, 212 
 Bastard, the family, 18, 36 
 Bath, I^rd, 60, 208 
 
 Reynolds in, 153 
 
 Beaconsfield, 179, 183 
 Beattie, 41, 99, 121, 126 
 Beauchamp, Lady, 180 
 Beauclerk, Lady Diana, 145 
 
 sig 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 Beauclerk, Topham, 144, 145 
 Beaufort, Duke of, 59 
 Beaumont, Lady, 139, 143 
 
 Sir G., 139, 189 
 
 Beckford, Lord Mayor, 35, 197 
 
 William, 152 
 
 Beechey, 216 
 
 Beggars (pictures of), ill 
 
 Behn, Afra, 7 
 
 Bellamont, Lord, 122, 126 
 
 Belvoir, 144 
 
 Biaggio, 14S 
 
 Billington, Mrs., 170, 177 
 
 Bingham, Honourable Miss, 167, 
 
 173 
 
 Bishop, Miss, 48 
 
 " Blackguard Mercury," 29 
 
 Blackstone, 87, 208 
 
 Blake, W., 72, g6, 215 
 
 Lady, as Juno, 38, 86 
 
 Blakeney, Governor, 22 
 
 Blessington, Earl of, 123 
 
 "Blue" parties, 119 
 
 Bologna, 21, 24 
 
 Bonfoy, Mrs., 18, 34 
 
 Boniface, St., 17 
 
 Bonomi, 180, 182 
 
 " Book of Emblems," 6, 7 
 
 Boothby, Brook, 165 
 
 Mr. (" Prince "), 49, 50, 160, 
 
 161, 162 
 
 Penelope, 175, 176 
 
 Boscawen, 34, 35, 208 
 
 Boswell, 42, 46, 47, 164, 172, 
 179, 180, igo, 194 
 
 Bouverie, Master, 58 
 
 Mrs., 48, 86, 88, 109 
 
 Bower, A., 36 
 
 Bowles, Miss, 129, 209 
 
 Boydell's " Shakespeare," 171 
 
 " Boy Hearkening to a Marvel- 
 lous Story," 98 
 
 " Boy Reading," 134 
 
 " Boy Reading by a Reflected 
 
 Light," 13 
 " Boy with Cabbage Nets," 119, 
 
 129, 130 
 Braddyll, Mrs., 176, 210 
 Breda, 184 
 
 Brock, the village, 149, 150 
 Brook Boothby, 165 
 Brown rug, the, 156 
 Browning anticipated, 93, loo 
 Bruges, 154 
 Brummell, Beau, 151 
 Brussels, 154, 165 
 Buccleuch, daughter of the Duke 
 
 ol, 133 
 BuUer family, 18, 48, 117 
 Bunbury, Lady Sarah, 38, 62, 66 
 
 Master, 149 
 
 Mrs., 63 
 
 Sir C., 69 
 
 Burghersh, 172 
 Burgoyne, General, 80, 117 
 Burke, 31, 40, 41, 65, 68, 69, 82, 
 
 83, 84, 85, 88, 104, 112, 120, 
 
 122, 126, 140, 142, 148, 149, 
 
 153, i6s, 167, 170, 174, 179, 
 
 18s, 194. 208, 217 
 Burnet, J., 216 
 Burney, Dr., 41, 149 
 
 F.,76, 137, I S3, 1S4 
 
 Bury, Councillor and Mrs., 12 
 Bute, Lord, 61 
 
 Countess, 143 
 
 Butler (author of Hudibras), 184 
 Byng, Admiral, 47 
 Byron, Captain, 53, 136 
 
 Cadiz, 22 
 Cagliostro, 168 
 Camden, Earl, 209 
 Campbell, Miss, 139 
 Canterbury, Archlnshop of, 62 
 Caracci, 25 
 
 220 
 
Index 
 
 Caravaggio, 150 
 
 Cailini, 14S 
 
 Catnac, Mrs., 139, 209, 211 
 
 Caroline, Princess, 80, 81 
 
 Carpenter, W., 14 
 
 Carysfort, 69 
 
 " Castle of Otranto," lo5 
 
 Catdown, 16 
 
 Catharine of Russia, 98 
 
 Cathcart, Lord, 122 
 
 Cats, Jacob, 6, 7 
 
 Cavendish, Lord, 147, 149 
 
 Cecchina, 85 
 
 Cecilia, St., Mrs. Billington as, 
 177; Mrs. Sheridan as, 129; 
 Mrs. Weddell as, 130 
 
 Chambers, Mrs., 25 
 
 Sir W., 146, 208 
 
 Champaigne's picture of Riche- 
 lieu, 171 
 
 " Characteristical style," the, 118 
 
 Charlemont, Lord, 64, 65 
 
 Charlotte, Queen, 108, 142, 143, 
 146 
 
 Chatham, Lord, 138, 192 
 
 Chatterton, 113 
 
 Chaundy, Captain and Mrs. , 12 
 
 Chaworth, Mary, 136 
 
 Chesterfield, 96 
 
 Cheylesford, Lord, 137 
 
 "Child Asleep," 149 
 
 " Children in the Wood," 107 
 
 "Children of condition," 105, 
 106, 125, 170 
 
 " Child Samuel," 131 
 
 "Child with Guardian Angels," 
 167 
 
 Cholmondeley, Mrs., 85, 106 
 
 Chudleigh, Miss, 12 
 
 Cipriani, 145 
 
 Circe, Mrs. Nisbett as, 151 
 
 Clavering, 53 
 
 "Cleopatra, Death of," 178 
 
 Olive, Kitty, 115 
 
 Cockburn family, the, 123, 125, 
 
 126, 17s, 206 
 Coke, Lady M., 49, 61, 62 
 Coleridge, S. T., S, 17 
 CoUina, 129 
 Collins, J. C, 216 
 CoUyear, Mrs., 63 
 Colman, 41, 112 
 " Comedy and Tragedy, Garrick 
 
 between," 206, 213 
 Connoisseur, 50, 107, 132, 156, 
 
 IS7. 161, 173, 211 
 Constable, 174 
 "Continence of Scipio," 178 
 Conway, General, 68 
 Conway, Lady Elizabeth Seymour, 
 
 151, 209 
 " Cornelia and her Children," 123 
 Coronation of George III. , 59 
 Correggio, 73, 93, 102, 141 
 Costume in eighteenth century, 
 
 36 
 Cotes, 52, 81, 86 
 Cotterel's, the Miss, 42 
 Cottonian Library at Plymouth, 10 
 " Count Gismond," 100 
 Courtenay, 193 
 Coventry, Countess of, 49 
 Cox, Master, 54, 125 
 Crabbe, 94i.iS4 
 Craunch, Miss, 61 
 
 Mr., 80 
 
 Mrs., 12 
 
 Crewe, Master, 175 
 
 Mr., 69 
 
 Mrs., 86, log, 117 
 
 Crosbie, Lady, 141 
 
 CuUoden, 50 
 
 Cumberland, Duke of, 50, 51, 60, 
 
 112, 117, 208 
 Cumberland, Duke and Duchess 
 
 of, 117, 122 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 Cunningham, A., 42, 57, 72, 119, 
 
 123, 188, 193. 194. 21S 
 " Cupid as a Link-boy," 1 12 
 Cust, Sir J., 83, 106 
 " Cymon and Iphigenia," 98, 178 
 Czartoryski, 49 
 
 Dance, N., 52, 77 
 
 Dante, 105 
 
 Darby, E., 162 
 
 Dartmoor, 147 
 
 Dashwood, Lady, 158 
 
 Daunt, O'Neill, 123, 124 
 
 Da Vinci, 7, 91 
 
 Davis, John, 11 
 
 Dawson, Lady A., 28 
 
 Day, Miss, 48 
 
 " Death of Cleopatra," 79 
 
 "Death of Wolfe," 148 
 
 De Gree, 193 
 
 Delaval, 49 
 
 Delm^, Lady Betty, 135 
 
 Deptford, 165 
 
 Devonshire Club, 21 
 
 " Devonshire Dialogue," 45 
 
 Devonshire, Duchess of, 127, 128, 
 
 131. 157 
 Devonshire, Duke of, 28, 68 
 Devonshire men and Reynolds, 19 
 Reynolds in, 10, 14, 16, 17, 
 
 19, 20, 27, 42, 44, no, 147 
 Devonshire sitters, 18 
 Diana, the Duchess of Manchester 
 
 as, 86, 88 
 Dido, 98, 149 
 Dilettanti dinners, 19 
 Dilettanti pictures, 134 
 Discourses, L, 87; IL, 88; IIL, 
 
 iio-iii ; IV., 11S-116; v., 
 
 n8; VL,I27; VIL, 131, 132; 
 
 VIIL, 138; IX., 147; X., 147; 
 
 XL, 153; XIL, 160; XIIL, 
 
 168-169; XIV., 176; XV., 182 
 
 Discourses, analysis of, 90, 91, 92, 
 
 9S. 96, 97. 98. 99. «oo, loi, 
 
 102, 103, 217 
 Dobson, Austin, 13 
 Domenichino, 130 
 Dorinda, 119, 179 
 Doughty, 31 
 Dow, Colonel, 117 
 Drake, Sir F., 11 
 Draycote, Miss, 62 
 Drogheda, Marquis of, 32 
 Dryden, 6, 7 
 Du Fresnoy, 7, 94 
 Dulwich Gallery, see Gallery 
 Dunning, J., 39, 86, 116, I40, 
 
 147. IS3. 208 
 " Dying Cardinal Beaufort," 171, 
 
 172 
 Dyson, 69 
 
 Eardly, Lord, 63 
 
 Edgcumbe family, the, 7, 12, 18, 
 
 22, 28, 49, 125, 126 
 Edinburgh, 84 
 Edward, Prince, 51 
 Edwards, 180 
 Eglinton, Lord, 157 
 Eliot family picture, the, II, 12 
 
 Miss, 18 
 
 " Eliza," 200 
 
 Englefield, Sir H., 172 
 
 Eon, Chevalike d', 16S 
 
 Errol, Lord, 60, 61 
 
 Erskine, T., 167 
 
 Essex, 180 
 
 •• Et In Arcadia Ego," 109 
 
 Euripides, 191 
 
 Evelina, 137 
 
 Exeter, 17, 18, 147 
 
 Exhibition at Royal Academy, 
 
 first, 88 
 Exhibition in the Strand, first, 
 
 205 
 
 222 
 
Index 
 
 Facgy, Alderman, 12 
 
 Farington, T., 215 
 
 Fashion in the eighteenth century, 
 
 Feathers, 128, 129 
 Ferguson, Dr., 152 
 Fergusson, Adam, 41 
 Ferrara, 25 
 Field, Mrs., 12 
 Fielding, 40 
 " First nights," 1 19 
 Fisher, Edward, 213 
 
 Kitty, SI, 52, 60, 62, 67, 80, 
 
 85, 212 
 Fitzherbert, Mrs., 1 69, 176 
 Fitzpatrick, Lady Ann, 129 
 Fitzroy, Mrs., 62 
 Flaxman, 76, 1 10 
 Fletcher, E., 217 
 Florence, 14, 15, 23, 24, 205 
 Fontenoy, 122 
 Ford, John, 17 
 " Fortune-Teller, The Little," 98, 
 
 m> 134 
 
 Fox, Charles James, 59, 60, 66, 
 
 81. 153. IS7. 158 
 Fox, Henry, 63, 64 
 
 Lady Caroline, 48 
 
 Fra Angelico, 24 
 
 Fra Bartolommeo, 24, 91 
 
 Fra Lippo Lippi, 93, 94 
 
 French Revolution, 164 
 
 Fresnoy, Du, 7, 94 
 
 Fuseli, 77, 108, 166, 182, 195 
 
 Gagakin, Princess, 160, 161 
 Gainsborough, 52, 83, 108, 153, 
 
 154, 161, 168, 176, 186, 188, 
 
 189, 194 
 Gallery, Dulwich, 15, 16, 51, 130, 
 
 156, 210 
 Gallery, National, 15, 16, 38, 39, 
 
 46, 48, 59. 104. 123, 130, 143, 
 
 144. IS4. 163. 164. 170, 171, 
 
 174, 177. 179. 207 
 Gallery, National, of Scotland, 84 
 National Portrait, 8, 15, 
 
 35. 38, 39. SO. S3. 58, 60, 63, 
 
 83, 86, 87, 118, 127, 13s, 136, 
 
 146, 178, 208 
 Gallery, Pitti, 23 
 Gandy, T., 9, 10, 17, 18, 19 
 Gardiner, Luke, 120, 123, 124 
 Garrick, D., 52, S3. 60, 88, 99, 
 
 108, 112, IIS, ii3. 120, 131, 
 
 141, 206, 213 
 Garrick, Mrs., 53, 116, 120 
 Gay, John, 17 
 
 Genevieve, Mrs. Crewe as, 117 
 Gentlemen, Portraits of Two, 136 
 George III., 20, 35, 51. 59. 81, 
 
 82, 86, 87, 88, 108, 109, no, 
 
 III, 143, 146, 176, 190, 206 
 George IV., 143, 151, 169, 172 
 Ghent, IS4 
 Ghirlandajo, 24 
 Giardini, 58 
 
 Gibbon, 41, 121, 133, 143, 146 
 Gibraltar, 11, 22, 174 
 Gideon, Samson, 63 
 Gilbert, Sir H., 11 
 "Gipsy Boy, The," 119 
 " Girl Reading," 113, 114 
 " Girl Sleeping," 175 
 Glasgow Corporation Gallery, 79, 
 
 129, 178 
 " Gleaners, The," 175 
 Gloucester, Duchess of, 113, 125, 
 
 147 
 
 Godolphin, Lord, 28 
 
 Goethe, 142 
 
 Goldsmith, 37, 40, 41, 45, 68, 69, 
 70, 71, 72, 108, 112, 113, 116, 
 117, 119, 120, 121, 133, 190, 
 191, 206, 209, 212, 213 
 
 Gordon, Frances, 170, 172, 208 
 
 223 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 Grafton, Duke of, 28, 104, 122 
 Granby, II, S7,'8o, 106, 144 
 " Grand style," the, 90 
 Graves, Algernon, 13, 49, 107, 
 
 IS7, 161, 162, 172, 19s, 216 
 Gray, T., 41 
 Great Newport Street, 28, 42, 57, 
 
 205 
 "Greek, The Fair," 152 
 Grenville, Sir R. , 1 1 
 "Guardian Angels, Child with," 
 
 167 
 Guercino, 8, 24, 25 
 Guido Reni, 25 
 Guise, General, SS 
 Gunning, Elizabeth, 56 
 Gunnings, the beautiful, 49, 53 
 Gwynn, Stephen, 12, 64, 213, 217 
 
 Haldane, 34 
 
 Hale, Mrs., as Euphrosyne, 79 
 
 Halifax, 69 
 
 Halliday, Lady Jane, 143 ' 
 
 Hamilton, Captain, lo, 11 
 
 Duchess of, 49, 56 
 
 E., 214, 216 
 
 Lady, 73, 74 
 
 Sir W., 13s, 136, 157, 208 
 
 " Handling," 187 
 Hannibal, Master Cox as, 125 
 Harcourt family, the, 154 
 Harcourt, General, 148 
 
 Lady, 148, 151 
 
 Lord, 35, 148 
 
 Hardwicke, Lord, 68 
 Harrington group, 171 
 Harrison, Sir T., and Lady, 49 
 Hart, Emma, 73 
 Hartley, Mrs., 115, 120, 122 
 Hastings, Mrs., 167 
 
 Warren, 80, 173, 174, 175, 
 
 179 
 Hawkesworth, 41, n6 
 
 Hawkins, 11 
 
 Hayman, 19, 52 
 
 Hazlitt, W., 217 
 
 Heads of Angels, 170, 172, 208 
 
 Heathfield, Lord, 11, 173, 176, 
 
 208 
 Hebe, 116 
 Hercules, 93 
 Hercules, the Infant, 98, 126, 160, 
 
 165, 166, 170, 17s 
 Hickey, 117 
 Hillsborough, 34 
 " History Painting," 98 
 Hoare, Master, 155, 176 
 
 Mrs., and her son, 155, 209 
 
 Hobbes's Homer, 95 
 
 Hogarth, 9, 45, 189, 197, 212 
 
 Holderness, Lord, 30, 31, 34 
 
 Holland House, 59 
 
 Holland, Lord, 63, 64 
 
 Homer (Hobbes's), 95 
 
 Hone, 52 
 
 Honywood, Lady, 158 
 
 Hooker, Richard, 17 
 
 Hoole, 41, 13s 
 
 "Hope nursing Love" (Miss 
 
 Morris as), 86, 88 
 Horneck, Mrs., 18, 49 
 Horneck, the Misses, 63, 67, 80, 85 
 Horton, Mrs., 88, 117 
 Huddesford, Mr., 135, 136 
 Hadibras, 1 84 
 Hudson, 8, 9, 12, 14, 19, 34, 26, 
 
 28, 205 
 Hume, A,, 154, 155, 208 
 Hume, David, 121 
 Hunter, J., 164, 167 
 Huntingdon, Lord, 30 
 Hymen,, 120, 123, 127, 207 
 
 " Ideal excellence," 92 
 " Idealising," 36, 37, 15S 
 Idler, S3, 90, 94, 100, 149, 199 
 
 224 
 
Index 
 
 " Ignorant present," the, 169 
 Imagination, Reynolds on, loi 
 Imitation, Reynolds on, 168 
 Impressionist School anticipated, 
 
 100, loi 
 Incorporated Society of Artists, 
 
 56, 82, 85 
 Infant Hercules, 98, 126, 160, 165, 
 
 166, 170, 17s 
 Infant Jupiter, 126 
 Infant Samuel, 130, 208 
 Infant Samuel Johnson, £4 
 Innocent X., 91, 189 
 "Ironside, Mr.," 200 
 Isaiah, Michael Angelo's, ISS 
 Italy, 69, 70 
 
 Jknkinson, 61 
 
 Jerrold, D., 172 
 
 "Jessamy Bride," the, 18, 63 
 
 Jesuifs Perspective, The, S, 6, 94 
 
 Jewel, Bishop, 17 
 
 Johnson, Samuel, 19, 20, 21, 26, 
 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 
 48. 54. 57. 59. 61, 64, 65, 79. 
 94, 109, no, III, 112, 113, 
 118, 129, 130, 131, 145, 146, 
 J54, 159, 164, 165, 170, 179, 
 180, 190, 193, 194, 196, 197. 
 205, 206, 217 
 
 Johnson's black servant, 85 
 
 Joie, Mr., 2 
 
 Jordan, Mrs., 167 
 
 Joseph (the biblical) 3, 3 - 
 
 Joshua (the biblical), 3 
 
 Joshua, the name, 3 
 
 Junius, 104 
 
 Juno, Lady Blake as, 38, 86 
 
 Jupiter, Infant, 126 
 
 Juvenilia, 5, 6, 7 
 
 Kauffmann, Angelica, 52, 73, 74, 
 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 88, 1 10, 135, 14S 
 
 " Keeping," 146 
 
 Kemble, Miss, 158 
 
 Kendal family, pictures of the, 10 
 
 Kennedy, Polly, 113 
 
 Kensington Museum, South, 48, 
 
 73. 75. 209 
 Keppel, Admiral, 22, 28, 29, 
 
 30, 38. 39. 47, 48, 5°. 55. 138, 
 139, 140, 143, 144, 147, 205, 
 208 
 
 Keppel, Lady C, 36, 53, 59 
 
 • Lady E., 36, 53, 56, 59 
 
 Kildare, Lady, 36 
 
 Kingsley, C, 17 
 
 Kingston, Duchess of, 12 
 
 Kirkley, Ralph, 184 
 
 Kneller, I, 8 
 
 La Bacelli, 154 
 
 Ladies as goddesses, 37 
 
 Lady, portrait of a, 209 
 
 Lake, use of, by Reynolds, 31, 33 
 
 Landscape, Reynolds and, 16 
 
 Landseer, 175 
 
 Lansdowne, 208 
 
 Laocoon, Reynolds on the, 99, 
 100 
 
 La Rena, 54, 58 
 
 La Zamperini, 85 
 
 Leconfield, Lord, 161 
 
 Lee, J., 140, 142, 167 
 
 Leicester Square, 56, 57, 67, 89, 
 205 
 
 Leighton, Lord, anticipated, 74 
 
 Lely, 1, 4. 8 
 
 Lennox, Lady Sarah, 59, 60 
 
 Leonardo da Vinci, 7, 91 
 
 "Lesbia weeping over her Swal- 
 low," 63 
 
 Leslie, 3, 6, 10, 14, 16, 29, 52, 
 S3. 54. SS. 71. 73. 75.86, izi, 
 122, 140, 141, 160, 166, 168, 
 180, 195, 199, 216 
 
 225 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 Ligonier, Lord, il, 34, 55, 58, 
 
 106, 207 
 Lincoln, Lady, 151 
 Lindsay, Sir David, 84 
 Liotard, 29, 75 
 Lippe, Prince, 62 
 Lisbon, 22 
 
 " Listening Boy," 149 
 Literary Club, 64, 94, 112, 119, 
 
 133, 144, 158, 206 
 
 " Little Comedy," 18, 63 
 
 " Little Fortune-Teller," 133, 134 
 
 " Love me, love my dog," 129, 
 
 209 
 Low Countries, Reynolds in the, 
 
 I49f IS4. 206 
 Lucas, Dr., 35 
 Ludovico, 24 
 Ltibke, 187 
 
 Macaulay, 80 
 Macaw, Reynolds's, 127 
 Macbeth, 102, 171, 172 
 Macpherson, J., 41, 118, 209 
 Maeterlinck anticipated, loi, 150 
 Malone, 41, 53, 54, 64, 126, 169, 
 
 170, 179, 180, 194, 209, 215, 
 
 217 
 Manchester, Duchess of, as Diana, 
 
 37. 86, 88 
 Manners, Lady Louisa, 141, 143 
 Mantua, 25 
 
 Marchi, 25, 28, 90, 212 
 March, Lord, 54 
 Marcus Antoninus, 7 
 Marlborough, Duke of, 17, 48, 61 
 Marlborough family group, 128, 
 
 134. 137. 138, 206 
 Marriage, Reynolds on, 75, 76 
 Martin's Lane, St., 9, 27, 28, 57, 
 
 205 
 Mason, W., 30, 31, 41, 94, 126, 
 216 
 
 McArdell (the engraver), 9, 27, 
 213 
 
 " Mercury, Blackguard," 29 
 
 Mercury, 98 
 
 Meyer, Miss, as Hebe, 117 
 
 Michael Angelo, 15, 23, 88, 91, 
 102, 118, ISS, 182, 199 
 
 Milton, 6, 7, 103 
 
 Minorca, 14, 22, 23, 47, 76, 205 
 
 Miranda, Mrs. Tollemache as, 125 
 
 Mitford, Mary, 177 
 
 Modena, 25 
 
 Molesworth, the family, 19 
 
 Molesworth, Mrs., 36 
 
 Monk, General, 17 
 
 Monkhouse, Cosmo, 211 
 
 Monkton, Miss, 135, 143 
 
 Montagu, Mrs., 117, 131 
 
 Montgomery, Elizabeth, 124 
 
 Montgomery, the Misses, 120, 121, 
 123, 124, I2S, 207 
 
 More, Hannah, 76, 130, 131, 137, 
 16S 
 
 Morntng Post, 159 
 
 Morris, Miss, as Hope, 86, 88 
 
 Moser, Mary, 75, 79, 108, 19S 
 
 Mother-and-Babe pictures by Rey- 
 nolds, 58, 59 
 
 Mother and her Sick Child, 51, 210 
 
 Mount Edgcumbe, 147 
 
 Mountjoy, Lord, 123, 124 
 
 Mudge, Dr., 83 
 
 the family, 19, 27 
 
 Master, 49, 54 
 
 Mr., 61 
 
 Muscipula, 98, 119, 175 
 
 Museum, South Kensington, 48, 
 
 73. 75. 209 
 Musters, Mr. and Mrs., 135, 136, 
 
 137 
 Mythologising, 113, 178 
 
 Nafier, General, 60 
 26 
 
Index 
 
 Napoleon I., 199 
 
 National Gallery, see Gallery 
 
 National Portrait Gallery, see Gal- 
 lery 
 
 Nativity, 118, 135, 140, 141, 144 
 
 Nelson, Robert, 7 
 
 Nesbitt, Mrs., as Circe, 151 
 
 Mis., with a dove, 210 
 
 Newcomen, 17 
 
 Newport Street, Great, 28, 42, 57, 
 20s 
 
 Newton, Bishop, 126 
 
 Newton, Lord, 85 
 
 Nollekens, 27, 32, 145 
 
 Norman, Florinda, 124 
 
 Norris, Mr., 85 
 
 North, Lord, 35 
 
 Northcote, J., 2,. 8, 19, 20, 33, 
 64, 114, 116, 120, 161, 186, 188, 
 198, 206, 215, 217 
 
 Nuneham, 148, 154 
 
 Nymph and Bacchus, 113, 120 
 
 O'Brien, Nelly, 58, 60, 61, 62, 
 
 66, 67, 85, 209 
 "Offy," 3, no, 119, 151, 177, 
 
 178, 179 
 Oglethorpe, General, 144 
 O'Hara, James, 49 
 Old Man, 113 
 Old Masters, Reynolds and the, 
 
 91, loi, 115, 138, 160, 183, 188 
 "OldQ.," 54,209 
 Old Slaughter's Club, 9, 57, 213 
 Omiah, 105, 128, 131 
 Opie, 32, 150, 186 
 Orcagna, 24 
 Ord, Mrs., 119 
 Orleans, Duke of, 164, 167 
 Orme, Captain, 59, 207 
 Ossory, Countess of, 183, 196, 
 
 199 
 Ossory, Lord, 142, 168 
 
 " Our Village," 177 
 Ovid, 7 
 
 Oxford, 14, 120, 136, 149, 158, 
 206 
 
 Paine, Thomas, 199 
 Paine, James, 80 
 Palmer, Mary, 44, 45, 185 
 Palmerston, Lord, in 
 " Paradise Lost," 103 
 Paris, 25, 85, lis, 20s 
 Parker, Master, 125 
 
 Mrs., 123 
 
 the family, 18, 1319 
 
 Parma, 25 
 
 Pasquin, A., 215 
 
 Paul, St., 97, 138 
 
 Paul's, St. (Cathedral), 122, 185, 
 
 206 
 Payne Galwey, Mrs., 139 
 Pembroke, Lady, 61, 62 
 
 Lord, III 
 
 Penn family picture, 36 
 
 Lady Juliana, 36 
 
 Percy, Bishop, 2, 41 
 
 Perspeclive, The Jesuit's, 5, 6 
 
 Peruke, Speaker's, 85 
 
 Peter Pindar, 152, 154, 159, 163 
 
 Peter the Great, 165 
 
 Petersburg, St., 178 
 
 Petworth, 161, 162 
 
 Picture cracking, 31, 33 
 
 Pilfering, 29 
 
 Pindar, Peter, 152, 154, 159, 163 
 
 Pineapple Tavern, 57 
 
 Piozzi, Mrs., 66 
 
 Piping Shepherd, the, 119 
 
 Pitti Gallery, 23 
 
 Plagiarism, 29 
 
 PlutarcKs Lives, 6, 7 
 
 Plymouth, 10, 16, 18 
 
 Plymouth Dock, 9, 10, 11, 13, 16, 
 
 205 
 
 227 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 Plympton, 2, 3, 4, 7, 12, 18, 20, 
 
 21, 6[, 118, 121, 147, 205, 206, 
 
 216 
 Plympton Dock, 12 
 "Poetical," 97, 98, 99, 117, 151 
 Politics, Reynolds and, 82, III, 
 
 112, 128, 141, 142, 179 
 Polonius, 97 
 Pomfret, Lady, 62 
 Pope, 7, 8, 20, 57, 144 
 Port Eliot, 16, 147 
 Portland, Duke of, 68, 169 
 Portland Vase, the, 170 
 Portrait Gallery, National, see 
 
 Gallery 
 Portraits of Two Gentlemen, 136 
 Pott, Mr., 157-158 
 Pott, Mrs., 158 
 Poussin, 102 
 Powell, Mifes H., 88 
 Praying Samuel, 130 
 Price, Miss, as shepherdess, 108 
 Prices of engravings, 211 
 Prior, M., 64 
 Prophet Samuel, 130, 131, 156, 
 
 211 
 Pseudo-classicism, no 
 Public criticism, Reynolds on, 191 
 Puck, 171, 172 
 Pulling, Mr., 51, 149, 166, 175, 
 
 197, 216 
 Pulteney, William, 60, 208 
 Putney, 172 
 Pythagoras, 146 
 
 QUARRINGTON, Mrs., as St. 
 
 Agnes, 117 
 Quarterly Review on Reynolds, 
 
 216 
 Queensbury, Duke of, 54, 209 
 
 Raeburn, Sir H., 85 
 Raleigh, 11 
 
 Ralph's Exhibition, 184 
 Ramsay, 81, 82, 159, 206 
 Raphael, 23, 24, 73, 91, 92, 97, 
 
 99, "8, 139, 145 
 Reade, Charles, 168 
 Rebecca, 145 
 " Refined Expression,'' 99 
 Rembrandt, 14, 18, 93, 102 
 Rena, La, 54, 58 
 Reni, Guido, 25 
 " Renny dear," 42, 43 
 "Resignation," 71, 213 
 " Retaliation," 72 
 Reynolds, engraver, 213 
 Frances, 27, 42, 43, ,54, 72, 
 
 13s. .193. zoS 
 
 Sir J., account book of, 216 
 
 Alderman, n8 
 
 anecdotes of, 12, 64, 107, 
 
 avarice of, considered, 193 
 
 bibliography of, 215 
 
 birth of, 2 
 
 blindness of, 178, 180, 184, 
 
 206 
 
 burial of, 185 
 
 card-playing, love of, for, 55 
 
 carriage of, 57, 197 
 
 cheerfulness of, 196 
 
 children pictures, 105, 106, 
 
 139, 181, 199, 200, 201, 216 
 
 chronology of, 205 
 
 colouring of, 30-33 
 
 courtesy of, 192 
 
 daily life of, 188 
 
 deafness of, 23, 196, 205 
 
 death of, 185 
 
 Devonian in, 17-21 
 
 Dutch strain in, 4, 140, 150 
 
 engravings after, 211 
 
 exhibition, first, of pictures 
 
 of, 56 
 fondness of, for birds, 179 
 
 328 
 
Index 
 
 Reynolds, first great picture of, 2^ 
 
 formalism of, 13 
 
 fortitude of, 179 
 
 as host, 193 
 
 humour of, S4> 197-8 
 
 intemperance of, alleged, 196 
 
 King's painter, 159 
 
 knighted, 3, 206 
 
 love-letters of, 76 
 
 as lover, 137 
 
 Mayor, 20, 121 
 
 naming of, 2 
 
 notes on art by, 2i6 
 
 parents of, 3 
 
 personal appearance of, 195-6 
 
 portraits of, by, 13-16, 129, 
 
 148, 192, 195, 208, 209, 211 
 
 P.R.A., 206 
 
 pupils of, 90, 136 
 
 and Royalty, 20, 81, 82, 87, 
 
 109, 138, 142, 159, 163, 182 
 
 rupture with R.A., 182 
 
 sisters of, 25 
 
 teacher and writer, 90, 94 
 
 travels of, 22, 205 
 
 versatility of, 131 
 
 women pictures of, 37, 38, 
 
 132. 157 
 . Samuel, 3, 4, 5, 7, 9, 10, 17, 
 
 114 
 
 Theophila, 3 
 
 Rhineland, Reynolds in the, 149 
 Richardson (author of Treatise on 
 
 Painting), 5, 6, 94 
 Richardson, Samuel, 40, 41 
 Richelieu, painted by Champaigne, 
 
 171 
 Richmond, Duchess of, 62 
 
 Duke of, 50 
 
 Richmond Hill, Reynolds's house 
 
 on, 89 
 Richmond House theatricals, 173 
 Robertson, 41, 117 
 
 Robinetta, 119, 179 
 Robinson, Dr., 129, 143 
 Robinson, Mrs., 151, 152, 160, 
 
 161, 167, 210 
 Rockingham, 68, 86, 209 
 
 Lady, 62 
 
 Rodney, ii, 60, 157, 176, 177 
 Romance and Reynolds, 78 
 Rome, 22, 23, 205 
 Romney, 76, iii, 161, 186 
 Rosa, Salvator, 118 
 Rothes, Earl of, 61 
 Rowley Poems, the, 113 
 Roxalana, Mrs. Abington as, 158 
 Royal Academy, see Academy, 
 
 Royal 
 Rubens, 102, 189 
 Ruskin on Reynolds, 94 
 Russell family picture, 134 
 
 Lady E., 59, 60 
 
 Miss, 180 
 
 Lord William, 134 
 
 Rug, the brown, 156 
 
 Rutland, Duchess of, 144, 153, 157 
 
 Duke of, 141, 144 
 
 Sabin, F. T., 212 
 
 Sailors, Reynolds's pictures of, 1 1 
 
 St. Agnes, Mrs. Quarrington as, 
 
 117 
 St. Boniface, 17 
 St. Cecilia, Mrs. Billington as, 177 
 
 Mrs. Sheridan as, 130 
 
 Mrs. Weddell as, 130 
 
 St. John the Baptist in the Wilder- 
 ness, III, 210 
 St. John, Young, 130, 131 
 St Martin's Lane, 9, 27, 28, 57, 
 
 205 
 St. Paul, 97, 138 
 
 St. Paul's Cathedral, 122, 185, 206 
 St. Petersburg, 178 
 Salisbury, Lady, 107, 150 
 
 229 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 Saltram, 147 
 
 Salvator Rosa, 118 
 
 Sandes, Lady, 62 
 
 Sarsfields, the, 212 
 
 Saunders, Sir C, 68 
 
 Savage, Life of, 42, 94 
 
 Sculpture, Reynolds on, 147 
 
 Seeker, Archbishop, 209 
 
 Selection, Reynolds on, 199 
 
 Self-teaching, Reynolds on, 92 
 
 Selwyn, 60, 69 
 
 Seneca, 7 
 
 Seymour Conway, Lady E., 151, 
 
 209 
 Seymour Conway, Lady F., 151, 
 
 209 
 Shafto, 55 
 
 Shakespeare, 7, 94, 102, 169 
 Shakespeare, Boydell's, 99, 171 
 Shakespeare, Johnson's, 65 
 Sharpe, Joshua, 164, 167 
 Shelburne, 63, 104, 208 
 Shepherd Boy, the, 98 
 Sheridan, 41, 133, 173, 174, 175, 
 
 177, 183 
 Sheridan, Mrs., 79, 128, 129, 141 
 Shortgrove, 180 
 Siddons, Mrs., 52, 81, 83, 105, 
 
 123, 144, 153, ISS. 156, 158. 
 
 167, 206, 2H 
 
 Silius, 34 
 
 Silvia, the mountain maid, 143 
 
 "Simplicity," 177 
 
 Simplicity, Reynolds on, 138 
 
 "Sketch, A," 211 
 
 Skipsey, J., 72 
 
 Slaughters Club, old, 9, 57, 213 
 
 Sleeping Girl, 98 
 
 Small-pox, 5 
 
 Smart, Parson, 7, 17 
 
 Smith, Captain, 49 
 
 J. R., 137, 139,211 
 
 J.T., 32, 77 
 
 Smith, Sydney, 193 
 
 Smollett, 40 
 
 Smyrna, 152 
 
 Smythe group, 171 
 
 " Snake in the Grass," 163, 208 
 
 SnufF, 183, 196 
 
 Society of Arts, 56 
 
 Somerset House, 112, 145, 146 
 
 Somers, Lady E., 10 
 
 Sophia, Princess, 125 
 
 South Kensington Museum, 48, 
 
 73. 7S. 209 
 Speaker's. Peruke, the, 85 
 Spectator, 7, 200 
 Spencer, Lady Charlotte, 134, 167, 
 
 173, 212 
 Spencer, Lord Henry, 134 
 Spitchwick, 147 
 " Squire Musters," 136-137 
 Stanley, Lady B., 127 
 Sterne, 41, 56, 59, 67, 206 
 Stewart, Anne, 123 
 Stewarts, the, 212 
 Stormont, 30 
 Strange, Robert, 213 
 Strangways, Lady S., 59 
 "Strawberry Girl," 98, 118, lig, 
 
 120, 210 
 Streatham portraits, 148 
 Stuart, A., 141 
 Study, Reynolds's, 188 
 Sullivan, 9, 213 
 Swedenborg, 170 
 
 Tarleton, Colonel, 11, 152 
 
 Tasso, 41, 13s 
 
 Taller, 7 
 
 Taylor, T., 6, 12, 24, 35, 40, 47, 
 SI. 52. S3. 64. 65, 68, 71. 78. 
 82, 85, 89, 108, 109, iiS, 129, 
 130, 134, 135, 140, 148,. 152, 
 ISS. IS9. 161. 16S, 166, 179, 
 180, 199, 216 
 
 230 
 
Index 
 
 " Tell-a-clocks," 21 
 Temple, Lord, 83, 131 
 Tennant, Sir C., 15, 134 
 Thackeray, 81 
 
 Miss, 36 
 
 Thai's, 98, 149 
 Theophrastus, 7 
 " Theory on Clouds," 145 
 Thomond, Marchioness of, 185 
 Thornhill, Sir J., 27 
 Thrale, 15 
 
 Mrs., 46, 122 
 
 Thrales, the, 79, 126 
 
 " Three ladies decorating a statue 
 
 of Hymen," 120, 121, 123, 125, 
 
 207 
 Thurlow, Lord, 83, 152 
 Tiresias, 165 
 
 Titian, 34, 91, 93, 134, 168 
 ToUemache, Mrs., as Miranda, 
 
 Townshend, Lord, 35, 83, 122 
 Tragic Muse, Mrs. Siddons as the, 
 
 155, 158, 206, 211 
 Trapaud, Colonel, S7 
 
 Mrs., 63 
 
 Trecothick, 104, 108 
 
 Mrs., 104, 108, III 
 
 " Triumph of Truth," 121, 126 
 Turner, 185 
 
 Two gentlemen, portraits of, 208 
 Tyrawley, 49 
 
 Ugolino, 71, go, 99, 100, 104, 
 105, 106, 114, 116, 120, 208, 
 213 
 
 Una, 143, HS, H6 
 
 Unstable colours, 31, 32, 33, 34 
 
 Ushant, 138 
 
 Vanbrugh, Philip, 10 
 Vandyke, i, 4, 56, 93 
 Vatican, 23, 91, 92, 205 
 
 Velasquez, 91, 189 
 
 Venice, 25 
 
 Venus, 54, SS, 98, 113, 163 
 
 Vermilion, Reynolds's use of, 33 
 
 Vernons, the, SSi S6 
 
 Vicar of Wakefield, 37, 44, 69, 
 
 121 
 Vinci, L. da, 7, 91 
 Voltaire, 121 
 
 Waldegrave, Lady, 53, 58, S9, 
 60, 62, 66, 78, 80, III, 113, 147, 
 148 
 
 the Ladies, 146, 147, 149 
 
 Wallace Collection, 58, iii, 129, 
 
 139. 151. ISS. 161. 176, 209 
 Walpole, Horace, 30, 38, 41, 47, 
 
 53, 61, io6, 108, 113, IIS, 120. 
 
 129, 134, 141, 145, 147, 148, 
 
 153. IS4. 158, 16s, 172, 174, 
 
 211 
 Ward, Miss, 172, 173 
 
 James, 161, 217 
 
 Warton, 41, 112, 133, 158 
 Watson, Caroline, 212 . 
 Wax, use of, 33 
 
 Weddell, Mrs., as St. Cecilia, 130 
 Wells, Mrs., 174, 176 
 Wendover, 68 
 Went worth. Lady, 75 
 Wertheimer, Mr. A., 132 
 West, 81, 86, no, 14S, 163 
 Westminster, Duke of, 156 
 Weston, Miss, 77 
 Whetham, Mrs. T., 48, 209 
 Whistler, Mr., anticipated, 64 
 White, as captain of banditti, 1 17 
 " White's," 55 
 White, the beggar-man, 112, 117, 
 
 141 
 Wilkes, John, 35, 55, 82, 104, in 
 
 Mrs., 35 
 
 " Wilkes and Liberty," 104 
 
 231 
 
Sir Joshua Reynolds 
 
 Willes, Sir J., 8 
 Willett, Captain, 132 
 
 Willett, Mrs., 132 
 
 William of Gloucester, Prince, 148 
 
 Willies Current Notes, 76 
 
 Wilson, 188 
 
 Wilton, 24 
 
 Windham, 178, 209 
 
 Woburn Abbey, 183 
 
 Wolcot, 17, 152,154, iS9i 163. 188 
 
 Womanhood, 77 
 
 Woodward, 52, 58, 61 
 
 Wordsworth anticipated, 100 
 
 Worsley, Lady, 137 
 
 Sir R., 137 
 
 Wren, 185 
 
 Wynyard, Miss, 36 
 
 Yates, Mrs., 115 
 " Yellow Jack," 57 
 York, Archbishop of, 62 
 York, Duke of, 174, 176 
 Yorke, Master, 172 
 "Young St. John," 130, 131 
 
 Zamperini, La, 85 
 Zeuxis, HI 
 Zimmern, H., 216 
 Zofiany, 52, 108 
 Zucchero, i 
 Zucchi, A., 110 
 
 THE END. 
 
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