Sir Joshua Reynolds, first president of the Royal Academy

Front matter

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Contents

CHAP. PAGE

VIII. Sir Joshua’s Character as a Man .... 185

IX. The Art of Reynolds 191

Chapter I 1723—1752

IR JOSHUA REYNOLDS was born at Plympton Earl, in Devonshire, on the 6th of July, 1723. His father, the Rev.

Samuel Reynolds, was the Master of Plympton Grammar School, an institution founded in the last years of the Commonwealth by the famous and long-lived Sergeant Maynard, who may, in one important particular, be considered a prototype of Sir Joshua himself. Samuel Reynolds was a scholar of a kind by no means rare in pre-railway days. He was educated at Oxford, where he matriculated at Exeter College in 1698. He afterwards became a scholar of Corpus, from which College he took his B.A. degree in 1702 ; while in 1705 he was elected Chaplain-fellow — Socius 'perpetuus sacerdotalis — of Balliol. He was, we are told with perhaps a slight touch of exaggeration, as guileless and ignorant of the world as a child, and so absent-minded that he was likened by his friends to Fielding’s “ Parson Adams.” The few letters and anecdotes which have come down to us all show him in the same light, as a kindly, simple-hearted man, with very good brains nevertheless. His wife was one Theophila Potter, daughter of a parson and another Theophila, nee Baker. The history of this latter couple

I A is somewhat of a tragedy. They married against the will of the lady’s father, the Rev. Thomas Baker, who held a living at South Moulton, and had won distinction as a mathematician. Mr. Baker never forgave his daughter, and forgot her in his will ; her husband died after a few years of marriage, when, says tradition, she literally cried her eyes out, and then crept after him into the grave. The younger Theophila was almost a child when she became the wife of Samuel Reynolds. Nothing is known of her beyond a few incidental mentions in letters, which seem to indicate that she was a woman of some ability From Sir Joshua himself we derive scarcely any knowledge of his family. He was one of those people who do not occupy themselves much with the absent, although affectionate to those about them. We have therefore to depend for nearly all our information upon anecdotes collected by his admirers after he had become famous. From such evidence it is that we know the home at Plympton to have been happy, and the life of Sir Joshua to have begun with the placidity which marked it to the end. His father’s means were not small for his day and station. He is said to have had a stipend of .£120 per annum and a free house, which would go as far, perhaps, as £500 a year would now. His family, indeed, was large. Accounts differ as to the exact number of children with which his union with Theophila was blessed : Northcote says eleven ; Cotton “ ten or eleven,” but gives a list of eleven ; while another authority makes it twelve. But all accounts agree that the number had been reduced to six during the father’s lifetime, and there is no reason to suppose that the modest ambitions with which these six began life were ever thwarted for want of means. Only three were sons ; one became a lieutenant in the navy, the second an iron-monger * Leslie and Taylor.

PARENTAGE in Exeter, the third stepped practically without a struggle into the front rank of the most hazardous of all professions.

According to one authority, Samuel Reynolds dabbled in astrology, and used to spend “ many hours on the top of the old castle at Plympton studying the stars.” He amused himself — let us say — with casting nativities, and on one occasion lit upon the startling discovery that the life of a newly-born child was menaced by a great danger in its fifth year. The child, a girl, was guarded with the greatest solicitude, and as the fateful hour approached was not even allowed to leave the house. But the stars were inexorable. When the foretold date arrived, the little girl — another Theophila — was dropped out of an upstairs window from the arms of a careless nurse, and killed. This latter part of the story is corroborated by Northcote. Whether true or not, these astrological aspersions are consistent with what we know of the painter’s father. We may assert, without much diffidence, that his children spent a happy youth, with parents who exercised the kind of supervision which means leadership rather than control, and that the worst reproach they could have brought against Samuel Reynolds was for a certain slackness in stirring up their youthful ambitions.

The blame cast upon him by one at least of Sir Joshua’s biographers for neglecting his son’s education, does not seem to have been deserved. Reynolds had little opportunity for self-culture after his career in art had once begun. And yet he was, at least, a fair Latin scholar ; he could write his own language agreeably, and with some approach to correctness ; and the whole tenour of his intercourse in after years with the most brilliant men of his time, goes to show that he met them as an equal in matters of the intellect. Various stories are told by his biographers to illustrate his father’s aspect towards the nascent artistic feeling. Under a drawing in perspective, still extant, of a wall pierced by a window, made on the back of a Latin exercise, Samuel Reynolds has written, “ This is drawn by Joshua in school out of pure idleness.” But it gradually dawned upon the good dominie that pure idleness was an insufficient explanation, and to a later drawing, in which, with the help of the “ Jesuit’s Perspective,” Joshua wrestled successfully with the difficulties of the colonnade, or cloister, on which Plympton school-house was supported, he appended this note : <£ Now this exemplifies what the author of the ‘ Perspective ’ asserts in his preface, that, by observing the rules laid down in this book, a man may do wonders ; for this is wonderful.” His tolerance, too, of “ art ” is shown in the leave granted to Joshua and his sisters to draw with burnt sticks on the whitewashed passages of the house. On the whole, it is reasonable to conclude that Samuel Reynolds gave his children such an education as befitted his class and means ; it is certain that he kept an open mind as to their bestowal in life, and did not fall into the common parental error of fixing on a hole before he knew the shape of the peg.

It was not until Joshua was seventeen that his father took steps to find him a profession. He was then offered his choice between art and medicine, between becoming a painter or a country apothecary. Characteristically enough, he said he would rather follow medicine than become an “ ordinary ” painter, but that his choice would be reversed if his feet could be set upon a path which might lead to excellence. To us the phrase “ ordinary painter ” seems a strange one to use. We are accustomed to think of painting in either a very humble or a very high position, as devoted either to the protection of wood and iron, or to the production of pictures which may turn out candidates for immortality. But in the days of Reynolds, and for a

SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS Earl of Crewe

EDUCATION century afterwards, there was an intermediate industry, busied with the countless demands now fulfilled by the processes depending on the camera. Even in 1740 Plymouth could, no doubt, afford such an education as one of these “ ordinary painters ” would require. But Joshua’s ambitions would by no means be satisfied with that. He would go to London and be trained under the best master to be found, or he would be content with the s is of a country leech. His ideas had been enlarged, we are told, by reading the works of Jonathan Richardson, a writer and painter whose doings with pen and brush are even now too little esteemed. A horizon which Joshua’s unassisted vision could never have discovered from Plympton was opened to him by Richardson, and from the moment .that the book fell into his hands his fancy was no doubt at work on the possibilities of an artist in the great world outside. His father, more impressed, probably, by the trompe /’ ceil qualities of his “ perspectives ” than by his kindling enthusiasm, does not seem to have been difficult to persuade. He took measures to have the boy apprenticed to the most successful portrait painter of the moment, Thomas Hudson. The choice of Hudson, when Hogarth was in his prime, requires, perhaps, a word of justification. It was mainly due, no doubt, to the mere fact that Hudson was a Devon man and introduction therefore easy, but we must not forget that Joshua had already shown a real capacity for portraiture. While still scarcely in his teens he had contrived, under great difficulties, to produce a portrait of a certain Rev. Thomas Smart, a tutor in the Edgcumbe family. It was painted on an old sail, with ship’s paint, and is still in existence. Rough as it is, it has character and vitality. Probably, too, it was like the sitter, and so we need feel no surprise that its hint of a vocation was preferred to that given by the more u terrific subjects ” which the boy used to extract from the Book of Emblems of Jacob Cats, brought from Holland by his great-grandmother, a Dutchwoman.

Thomas Hudson used to pay periodical visits to Bideford. In that town Samuel Reynolds had a friend, an attorney called Cutcliffe. Leslie and Taylor print a series of letters from Reynolds to Cutcliffe, from which it appears that through the latter’s good offices, Hudson and young Joshua were brought together. In the end the painter agreed to take the lad as his apprentice for four years in consideration of a premium of ^120. Joshua arrived in London on the 13th October, 1740, and pending the return of Hudson from “ the Bath,” took up his abode with his own uncle, the Rev. John Reynolds, who, by the way, was a fellow of Eton. The whole affair, judging by the letters printed by Leslie and Taylor, was conducted with a good feeling on the part of Cutcliffe and Hudson, and with a simplicity of gratitude on the side of Reynolds, senior, which is full of charm. In a letter dated 26th October, 1740, the latter says to Cutcliffe : “ You have not only almost brought it about, but as if Providence had breathed upon what you have done, everything hitherto has jumped out in a strange, unexpected manner to a miracle. Nor can I see that if Mr. Treby# had many children, an apprenticeship under such a master would have been below some one of his sons. As if a piece of good fortune had already actually befallen my family, it seems to me I see the good effects of it already in some persons’ behaviour. This is my letter of thanks to you for what you have done .... (Joshua) has behaved himself mighty well in this affair, and done his duty on his part, which gives me much more concern in his behalf than I should otherwise have had, &c.” As for the

* “ The great man of Plympton,” say Leslie and Taylor.

APPRENTICESHIP premium of ^120 : “I have,” says Samuel Reynolds in a letter to Cutcliffe at the end of 1740, “ in a manner one half of the money already provided, if it please God I live so long as to the end of these four years ” ; the other £60 was advanced by his eldest married daughter, Mary Palmer, until Joshua himself should be able to repay it.

For nearly two years Joshua worked under Hudson. In a letter to Cutcliffe, dated 3rd August, 1742, his father writes : “As for Joshua, nobody, by his letter to me, was ever better pleased in his employment, in his master, in everything — ‘ While I am doing this I am the happiest creature alive ’ is his expression. How he goes on (’tis plain he thinks he goes on very well) you’ll be better able to inform me. I do not forget to whom I owe all this happiness, and I hope he will not either.” Besides the ordinary services which it was usual for an apprentice to render to a master, Joshua worked, by Hudson’s advice, at copying such “ old masters ” as he could reach. Among these were certain drawings by Guercino, which he is said to have reproduced with such skill that most of his copies afterwards passed as originals into the cabinets of collectors, and no doubt still so figure in many a modern museum.

The biographers of Reynolds have been unjust to his first master. They have spoken of his art with a contempt which it scarcely deserves, and have assumed that his teaching could have had no value for his pupil. The fact is that Hudson, in common with every English painter of the last century, except perhaps Hogarth, Gainsborough, and Sir Joshua himself, has suffered in reputation through the general ignorance of his work, and the acceptance of the slapdash generalisations about English painting which used to be indulged in by foreign critics. Another thing which has robbed him of his proper place, is the perplexity into which any one who tries to take him a little seriously is thrown by his promiscuous use of drapery men. Reynolds, in after years, was to depend on such aides as much as any English painter has ever done ; but he contrived to imbue them with his own spirit, so that, as a rule, we find no startling dislocation between their work and his own. It was otherwise with his master. According to an anecdote, to which we shall have presently to recur, Hudson was in the habit of painting a head upon a canvas, and then sending it off to the drapery man to be provided with a body and clothes. The result of such proceedings was what might have been expected. We find an extraordinary diversity, in kind as well as in quality, between one portrait and another. The National Gallery has a three-quarter length of Samuel Scott, the marine painter, which is at least as good as an early Reynolds. It is well arranged, well drawn, pleasant in colour, and quite free from hardness. On the other hand, I could point to many portraits which are cold and dry, and metallic in their texture. Of these, a three-quarter length of Lady Mountrath, in the Irish National Gallery, is a very favourable example. Again, there is a whole series of portraits by Hudson which, though hard in texture and deficient in movement, show a desire for elegance in the pose, and for such prettinesses as can be won by a judicious use of ribbons, flowers, and so on. Many of these are ascribed to Allan Ramsay, from whose authentic works they are to be easily distinguished by their more positive colour and comparative heaviness of hand. Hudson’s drawings, which are not very scarce, although they usually pass under other names, seem to show that of the three classes here indicated, the third is that in v/hich his own hand is chiefly to be recognised. Assuming that I am right in this, we may safely reject a large number of the outrageously stiff,

RUPTURE WITH HUDSON dry, and ill-drawn portraits to which his name has been so glibly attached during the last century or so. Judging by the pictures which can be safely identified as his, on the strength of drawings, contemporary engravings, and other trustworthy evidence, Hudson was a fair draughtsman— as draughtsmen go in this country — a sound and skilful painter, and, as a rule, an inoffensive colourist. As a master, he was to Reynolds what Hayman was to Gainsborough. He brought, indeed, no inspiration to his pupil, but he started him on the right path as a technical painter, putting into his hands an instrument which he could afterwards use to realise his own more ambitious aesthetic dreams.* After some twenty-two months in statu pupillari , Reynolds left his master’s house, and his indentures were cancelled. Various explanations have been given of this truncation of his apprenticeship. Most, if not all, of the writers on Sir Joshua have accepted the tradition that it was a case of Titian and Tintoretto over again ; and yet

all the real evidence on the point goes to negative any

such idea. Farington, indeed, gives a circumstantial account of the quarrel — for so he makes it — but his statement seems inconsistent with what we know of the subsequent relations of the parties. His story is that Hudson became alarmed at the rapid progress of his scholar, and determined to rid himself of one who might become a dangerous rival. One day he told him to take

a canvas, on which the head had been painted, to Van

Haaken, the drapery man, to be provided with a body. The evening was wet, and Joshua put off obedience until the following morning. At breakfast Hudson asked him * Many pictures ascribed to Hudson in English country houses and elsewhere are the work of Jeremiah Davison, a pupil of Lely, who had a large practice in London and Edinburgh in the first half of the eighteenth century. Important signed pictures by him are at Dalmahoy, Midlothian, and at Drayton Park, Northamptonshire.

why the canvas had not been taken ; Joshua pleaded the rain. “ You have not obeyed my orders,” said Hudson, “ and you shall not stay in my house.” Reynolds asked for delay, in order to write explanations to his father, who might otherwise misunderstand the incident. But Hudson would not listen to reason, and Joshua had to take himself off the same day to his uncle’s chambers in the Temple. It seems clear that if this were the whole truth of the matter, the relations between Hudson and the Reynolds family must have become strained for a time, even if they did not remain so permanently. But nothing of the sort occurred. On the 1 9th of August, 1 743, that is within a few days of the rupture, we find Reynolds senior writing to his friend Cutcliffe : “As to Joshua’s affair, he will give you a full account of it when he waits upon you, as he designs to do, and will be glad to present you with your picture, who have been so good a benefactor to him. ... I have not meddled with Joshua’s affairs hitherto, any otherwise than by writing a letter to Joshua, which never came to hand, and which I intended as an answer both to his letter and to his masters. This resolution of mine I shall persevere in, not to meddle in it ; if I had I should have taken wrong steps. I shall only say there is no controversy I was ever let into wherein I was so little offended with either party. In the meantime, I bless God and Mr. Hudson, and you, for the extreme success that has attended Joshua hitherto.” It was the same with Joshua himself. He and his master remained good friends, even in those after years when the latter might have been excused for some little chagrin and jealousy. From the very guarded letter just quoted we may, perhaps, infer that Hudson’s account of the difference did not agree with the version given by his pupil, and that the elder Reynolds declined to commit himself to a

MRS. MEYRICK

Oxford University Gallery

RETURN TO DEVONSHIRE decision between the two. Further than that we cannot see our way, and must come to the conclusion that the real cause of Joshua’s premature emancipation remains unknown. Judging by results, it took place exactly at the right time. He had learnt all that Hudson had to teach, and was induced to test its value at an age when neither failure nor success could do much harm. He returned at once to Devonshire, and accepted all the orders for portraits which came in his way. His industry must have been great. In a letter dated 3rd of January, 1744, only five months after the rupture with Hudson, his father tells Cutcliffe that he has already painted twenty portraits — “ among them that of the greatest man in the place, the Commissioner of the Dockyard ” — and that ten more are awaiting commencement.

How long he stayed in Devonshire on this occasion we have no means of finding out ; but we know that before the end of the year he was again in London. Leslie and Taylor print quotations from his father’s letters, which show that early in December Joshua had already been introduced by his old master, Hudson, to “ a club composed of the most famous men in their profession,” a club identical, suggests Tom Taylor, with that described in Smith’s “ Nollekens ” (vol. ii. p. 209), which met at Slaughter’s Coffee House, in St. Martin’s Lane. Many of the pictures dating from this first sojourn in his native place can still be traced. They are essentially Hudsonian, and go far to prove that it was not until his second visit to Plymouth that he came under the influence which was to make the first important change in his practice, and was to be the cause at once of much excellence and no little disaster to his works. To this point we must return presently. During the two years or more which Reynolds spent in London, between the autumn of 1744 and that of 1746, the influence of Hudson rapidly waned. The pupil and his former master were excellent friends ; of that there is abundant evidence ; but familiarity with a wider circle of artists, his own growing facility both of hand and mind, and a more intimate acquaintance, no doubt, with the great works of the past, gave a new freedom to his conceptions and less timidity to his brush. Pictures painted in 1745 and 1746 show that he was seeking for new forms of expression. They betray impatience with the old conventions, and leave us in no doubt that for every fresh sitter who appeared in his studio he endeavoured to invent a new formula, a new aesthetic equivalent. The originative impulse, the determination to repeat himself as little as was consistent with sincerity, by which Reynolds stands apart from all other portrait-painters of the eighteenth century, dates from these first two years of his independent activity in London, from a time when he was still under twenty-three years of age.

Towards the end of 1746, Samuel Reynolds was seized by his last illness, which ended in his death on Christmas Day. His son Joshua was summoned home to Plympton, whence, after the funeral, he moved to Plymouth Dock — now Devonport — where he set up house-keeping with his two unmarried sisters. Here he remained about three years, painting such portraits as came in his way, but on the whole taking life easily, at least for a time. Malone — who seems, however, to be here a little mixed in his chronology — says that when Reynolds recalled this period of his life, “ he always spoke of it as so much time thrown away, so far as related to a knowledge of the world and of mankind, of which he ever afterwards lamented the loss.” He goes on to say that “ after some little dissipation” Reynolds sat down seriously to the study and practice

GANDY OF EXETER of his art. Leslie and Taylor also speak of the first part of this second stay in Devonshire as a period during which he neglected his easel for the only time in his life. However that may be, it was certainly at this time that he came under an influence which was to have a profound effect on his future practice.

Among the many followers of Van Dyck was a certain William Gandy.* He was a man of narrow ambitions, who was content during most of his life to work for one or two patrons, and to remain obscure to the world at large. The Duke of Ormonde was his principal employer, and in Ireland only are his works now to be found. They are dry and tame, and by no means support the assertion that his pictures were sometimes confused with those of Van Dyck. He had a son, however, of greater powers than his own, who settled in Devonshire, and came to be known as Gandy of Exeter. His productions are probably not rare, for he had a vogue in his own neighbourhood, and must have painted many portraits in a year to make a living at the prices then ruling in the provinces. Most of his works no doubt pass under other names, or as “ unknown.” In Exeter itself a few may be seen in the College Hall, in the Hospital, and in the Poor-house. In a general way they are broad in treatment, sombre and monotonous in colour, richer in texture than was usual at the time, and more forcible in chiaroscuro. They have affinities on the one hand with Rembrandt, on the other with Opie. All Sir Joshua’s biographers declare that he was much affected by Gandy’s example, and there can be no doubt that a young man with such an open mind as we know young Reynolds to have possessed, would be much attracted, not perhaps so

* Born 1619. His son, Gandy of Exeter, died about 1730. The exact date is uncertain.

much by Gandy’s actual work, as by the promise his methods held out to a bold disciple. It is certain that during the period of rather more than two years which elapsed between his father’s death and his own final departure from his native county, he painted many pictures in which Hudson’s dry methods and formal arrangements are abandoned for a style which suggests the study of Rembrandt. One of the best of these is his own portrait, in the National Portrait Gallery, in which he is represented at work, his hand shading his eyes as he takes a look at the model. I must leave all detailed discussion of his pictures and the development of his art to future chapters, but may here point out that Reynolds could have had little knowledge of Rembrandt at this stage in his career. The broader conception, the more forcible light and shade, and the more solid texture, which now begin to mark his work, must have been chiefly due to the example of Gandy. We are told that one of the latter’s axioms was that “ a picture ought to have a richness in its texture, as if the colours had been composed of cream or cheese, and the reverse of a hard and husky or dry manner.” In the light of his after productions, we can imagine what an effect such a precept would have on our young painter’s mind. It would seem like taking down the shutter from a window opening upon an infinite landscape, and was probably the first hint he ever received that the texture of paint could in itself be made expressive and pleasure-giving. That he was afterwards so apt to out-Gandy Gandy, and to call in all kinds of strange substances to produce the effect of “ cream or cheese,” is, of course, to be lamented ; but for that the Exeter artist is not responsible. He at least deserves the credit of having started a great painter on the road which led to masterpieces not a few.

H

VOYAGE WITH KEPPEL

For some two years and a half Reynolds kept house at Plymouth Dock with his sisters, and cultivated his friendship with the Edgcumbes at Mount Edgcumbe, the Parkers at Saltram, the Eliots at Port Eliot, and other West of England families, who were as useful as they were kind to him for the rest of his life. A decisive change in his career was brought about by an acquaintanceship which began at Mount Edgcumbe. In the first months of 1749 the young sailor who was afterwards to be so famous and to lead to so much excitement in Sir Joshua’s own set as Admiral Keppel, was appointed to the command in the Mediterranean, and entrusted with a mission to the corsair States on the North African Coast. At that time Keppel was little more than a boy. He had not yet completed his twenty-fourth year, and so was even junior to Reynolds. He sailed from Spithead on the 25th of April, but a day or two later was obliged to put in to Plymouth for repairs. Here he was introduced to the young painter by Lord Edgcumbe, and the two found themselves so sympathetic that the Commodore offered to take the artist with him to the South. Such an opportunity was not to be neglected. Reynolds accepted the invitation with joy, and on the 1 ith of May H.M.S. Centurion weighed anchor for Lisbon, with the two very new but already very close friends on board.

In the Mediterranean Keppel went about his business, being sometimes accompanied by Reynolds, and sometimes not. The painter stayed at Gibraltar while Keppel crossed over to Tetuan, to harry the Moorish Governor on account of his ill-treatment of the British Consul and some English prisoners ; on the other hand, he went with him to Algiers, and was present at the famous interview when the Dey threatened the Commodore with the bowstring, and the Commodore replied with a menace which was to be fulfilled sixty years later by Pellew. Negotiating with the Dey was a very long business, and while the palavers were going on, Reynolds amused himself by visiting the Mediterranean Islands. In August he was at Port Mahon, as the guest of General Blakeney, the Governor, and there he painted most of the officers of the garrison. Minorca was to mark him for life, for while prowling about on horseback he met with the accident which disfigured his upper lip. His horse fell with him down some steep declivity, doing damage the traces of which are to be seen in most of the later portraits.*