Lady Anne Fitzpatrick (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston): a child portrait.

Lady Louisa Conolly (Harvard Art Museums): a portrait of one of the Lennox sisters (sister of Lady Sarah Bunbury).

Miss Crewe (private collection): a child portrait of a daughter of the Crewe family (see Master Crewe as Henry VIII).

Miss Fleming as Aurora (Harewood House): a fancy portrait of a young woman as the dawn-goddess.

Miss Jane Bowles (Wallace Collection): one of Reynolds's most beloved child portraits — a little girl leaning over to hug her spaniel — in the Wallace Collection.

Miss Jane Bowles (Victoria Art Gallery, Bath): another version of the beloved child-and-dog portrait.

Mrs Elizabeth Carnac (Wallace Collection): a full-length of the wife of an East India Company officer, in a landscape; a Wallace Reynolds.

Mrs Richard Paul Jodrell (Detroit Institute of Arts): a female portrait.

Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire (The Huntington Library): a portrait of the most celebrated society woman of the age, the Whig hostess and political campaigner; at the Huntington.

The picture

Oil on canvas — private collection. A small boy — John Crewe, aged about four — costumed as Henry VIII in the exact pose of Holbein's famous portrait: legs astride, hands on hips, the broad-shouldered stance, the flat cap and the slashed doublet, the whole swagger of the Tudor king performed by a child. Reynolds's wittiest child portrait and one of his most delightful pictures.

The joke

The picture is a visual joke of great sophistication: the most imposing image of English kingship — Holbein's Henry, the very type of masculine authority — reproduced exactly, but by a small child playing dress-up, so that the swagger becomes comedy and the comedy, somehow, becomes tenderness. The educated viewer was meant to recognise the Holbein at once (the Whitehall mural, known through copies), and to take the pleasure of the incongruity. It is Reynolds's fullest demonstration that the borrowed pose — the engine of the Grand Manner — could be turned to wit as well as to grandeur.

The child portrait

Reynolds made the child portrait his own by refusing both the miniature-adult stiffness of earlier practice and the mawkishness of later; his children are posed, costumed and allegorised exactly as adults, and the seriousness of the treatment is what makes the comedy work. Master Crewe is the extreme case — a child given the pose of a king — and it succeeds because the boy is painted as a real, absorbed, slightly uncertain child inside the royal swagger.

History

By descent in the Crewe family; private collection. Engraved and much reproduced as the type of the witty costume portrait.

What to look at

The Holbein pose; the child's uncertainty inside the swagger; the slashed doublet and flat cap. Then the incongruity, which is the whole delighted point.

Coda

Master Crewe as Henry VIII is Reynolds's proof that learning could be play: the grandest image of English kingship performed by a four-year-old, the borrowed pose turned from grandeur to comedy without losing its tenderness for the child inside the costume.

Reception

Master Crewe was engraved and became one of Reynolds's most popular inventions, the type of the witty costume portrait; its sophistication lies in the exactness of the Holbein quotation, which the educated viewer was meant to catch and enjoy, and in the tenderness with which the real, slightly uncertain child is painted inside the borrowed swagger of the Tudor king. It is the fullest demonstration in the œuvre that the device of the visual quotation could be turned, without strain, to comedy, and that Reynolds's learning was light enough to make a four-year-old the vehicle of a joke about the most imposing image of English kingship.

The Holbein and the joke

The Holbein Whitehall mural of Henry VIII — the very type of English kingship, all shoulders and stance and swagger — was known through copies and engravings, and Reynolds's exact quotation of it, performed by a four-year-old, was a joke the whole educated town could catch. The picture's tenderness is that the real child, uncertain inside the borrowed swagger, is never lost in the conceit; it is the fullest proof that the Grand Manner's engine of allusion could run to comedy.

The picture

Oil on canvas — The Huntington Library, San Marino. One of Reynolds's several portraits of his closest friend, Samuel Johnson (1709–1784), the lexicographer, critic and moralist — the great head, heavy and intent, the near-sighted eyes, the powerful features of the man whose Dictionary and Lives of the Poets dominated the age's letters. The Huntington's is one of the images by which Johnson's face is known.

The friendship

Johnson and Reynolds met in 1756 and were intimate until Johnson's death in 1784; Reynolds was among the friends at the deathbed, was named an executor, and painted Johnson at least five times. Johnson shaped the prose of the Discourses (correcting, not writing them), dedicated the last Idler papers to the painter's ideas, and made Reynolds one of the pillars of his life — 'the most invulnerable man I know'. The portraits of Johnson are the visual record of the friendship and among the most penetrating character studies in the œuvre, because with Johnson, as with the Club, Reynolds dropped the Grand Manner and painted the man.

The head

Johnson's was a difficult face — heavy, scarred by scrofula, myopic, working with the tics and abstractions Boswell records — and Reynolds painted it with an unflinching attention that catches the power and the strangeness both. The Huntington picture shows the great head in thought, the eyes unfocused, the mouth set; it is a portrait of a mind at work, and it is one of the reasons we think we know what Johnson was like.

History

By descent and the market; Henry Huntington's collection in California, where it hangs among the English portraits — Reynolds, Gainsborough, Lawrence — that the American magnate assembled.

What to look at

The heavy head; the myopic eyes; the set mouth; the plainness. Then Boswell's Life, which the picture illustrates.

Coda

The portraits of Johnson are Reynolds's most intimate achievement — the face of the age's greatest mind, painted by its greatest painter and closest friend, without allusion or flattery, as a man thinking. The Huntington's is among the finest of them.

Reynolds's Johnsons

Reynolds painted Johnson repeatedly across their long friendship — the young Johnson, the Johnson reading with his book held close to his myopic eyes, the great head in thought — and the portraits, taken together, are the fullest visual record of any of the age's writers. Johnson professed to dislike being painted 'with the appearance of a decrepit old man' and objected to the picture of himself squinting at a book, but he sat, again and again, for the friend who was also his executor and one of the pillars of his life. The Huntington's grave head is among the images by which posterity knows the face that Boswell's Life made the best-documented in English letters. The Huntington's Johnson, with the Frick's and the Tate's Gainsborough, is one of the images through which the American collections hold the age of Johnson that Reynolds and Boswell between them preserved.

The friend and the sitter

Johnson sat to Reynolds more often than almost any other sitter, and the friendship — from 1756 to Johnson's death in 1784 — was the closest of the painter's life; the portraits are its record, and they are the reason the face of the age's greatest writer is so familiar. Johnson's own reservations about being painted (he disliked, he said, the appearance of decrepitude) did not stop him sitting again and again for the man who was his executor, his intimate, and the one friend Boswell could not make him abuse.

Robert d'Arcy, 4th Earl of Holderness (National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo): a portrait of a secretary of state; a Reynolds in Japan.

Self-Portrait as a Deaf Man (Buffalo AKG Art Museum): another version of the self-portrait with the hand to the ear.

Self-Portrait (Tate/National Gallery): a self-portrait.

Self-Portrait as a Deaf Man (Tate/National Gallery): a self-portrait in which Reynolds cups his hand to his ear — a frank acknowledgement of the deafness he had carried since Rome; one of the most personal of the self-portraits.

Self-portrait (Uffizi Gallery): Reynolds's self-portrait for the Uffizi's collection of painters' self-portraits — the counterpart, in that gallery, to Kauffman's and Vigée Le Brun's; the President among the masters.

Sir Thomas Mills (sometimes called Major André) (Samuel Johnson Birthplace Museum): a male portrait, uncertainly identified.

David Garrick ('The Prologue Portrait') (National Trust): a portrait of the actor.

Francis Basset (Eton College): a portrait of the Cornish magnate; at Eton.

Huang Ya Dong (Wang-y-Tong) (National Trust): a portrait of a young Chinese visitor to England in the 1770s, a page in the Blackburne household — a rare portrait of a Chinese sitter in Georgian Britain, at Knole.

John Burridge Cholwich (Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter): a Devon gentleman.

Lady Bampfylde (Tate/National Gallery): a full-length of a young woman in a landscape.

Lady Caroline Scott as 'Winter' (private collection): a fancy portrait of a child muffled against the cold as the personification of Winter; one of Reynolds's most charming child pictures.

The picture

Oil on canvas, 236 × 145.5 cm — private collection, shared with the National Portrait Gallery and the J. Paul Getty Museum (jointly acquired 2023). A full-length of Mai (called Omai), the young man from Ra'iatea in the Society Islands whom Cook's second voyage brought to England in 1774, standing barefoot in a landscape in flowing white robes and a turban, one tattooed hand raised, the other holding a staff — the Grand Manner given, with complete seriousness, to a Polynesian. One of Reynolds's most beautiful pictures and among the most discussed works of British art.

Omai in London

Mai arrived in 1774 and spent two years as the sensation of London society — presented at court, inoculated, painted, lionised as the living embodiment of the age's dream of the 'noble savage' — before Cook returned him to the Pacific in 1776. Reynolds painted him full-length, in idealised classical drapery rather than his own dress, in a pose of natural dignity — the head high, the tattooed hands displayed, the bearing that of an antique orator or philosopher. The picture was exhibited at the Academy in 1776 and admired; it is the age's most serious attempt to represent the Pacific encounter, and it grants its subject a nobility the caricaturists denied him.

The complications

The picture is a masterpiece and a problem. It applies the European Grand Manner — the drapery, the pose, the dignity — to a real Polynesian, at once honouring him and assimilating him to European ideals; it dresses him not in his own costume but in a classicising invention; it makes him the emblem of a myth (the noble savage) as much as a portrait of a man. Its modern history has sharpened these questions: sold in 2001 for a record £10.3 million, subject to a long export battle, and finally acquired jointly by British and American institutions in 2023, it has become the picture through which the questions of empire, display and representation that the whole sitters' book raises are most acutely argued.

History

The painter's own until his death; by descent and the market; the Howard family at Castle Howard for over a century; sold 2001; jointly acquired by the National Portrait Gallery and the Getty in 2023 after an export deferral.

What to look at

The raised tattooed hand; the flowing robes; the high-held head; the imagined landscape. Then the double nature — a portrait of a man and an emblem of a myth — that the picture cannot escape and does not try to.

Coda

Omai is Reynolds's most beautiful full-length and his most complicated: the Grand Manner extended, with full seriousness, to a man from the far side of the world, honouring and idealising and appropriating him at once, in a picture that the age admired as a wonder and the present cannot look at simply.

Reception and the modern history

The picture's status has only grown: admired at the Academy in 1776, kept by the painter, treasured at Castle Howard for over a century, it became in 2001 the most expensive British painting sold at auction and the subject of a prolonged export battle, resolved in 2023 by a joint acquisition that keeps it partly in Britain and partly in Los Angeles. Its journey mirrors the questions it raises — of who owns the image of the Pacific encounter, and of how a European masterpiece that idealises a real Polynesian should now be seen — and it is, more than any other single work, the Reynolds through which the present argues with the empire the sitters' book records.

Thomas Bruce Brudenell-Bruce, later 1st Earl of Ailesbury (private collection): a portrait of a peer.

Saint John the Baptist in the Wilderness (Wallace Collection): a fancy picture of the child Baptist, in the Italian devotional tradition; a Wallace Reynolds.

The Calling of Samuel (Dulwich Picture Gallery): a version of the Infant Samuel subject.

The Child Baptist in the Wilderness (Minneapolis Institute of Art, Cook collection): a fancy picture of the infant Baptist.

The Infant Samuel (Tate/National Gallery): a version of the much-reproduced praying-child fancy picture.

Venus Chiding Cupid for Learning to Cast Accounts (Lady Lever Art Gallery): another version of the fancy-mythological subject.

The picture

Oil on canvas — Waddesdon Manor (National Trust). A subject-picture of young figures having their fortunes told — a fancy picture in the pastoral-genre mode, with the soft light and the sentimental subject that the age enjoyed and the engravers sold. One of Reynolds's essays in the picturesque genre-scene, distinct from the portraits.

The genre

Alongside the portraits and the histories, Reynolds painted a number of 'fancy pictures' with invented figures — beggar children, fortune-tellers, shepherdesses, the Strawberry Girl, Cupid as a Link-Boy — that belong to the pastoral-genre tradition of Murillo (whom Reynolds admired and collected) and the age's taste for the picturesque poor. The Fortune-Teller is one of these: a scene of young people and a gypsy, painted for its sentiment and its light, and engraved for the market. It shows the side of Reynolds that fed the popular print trade rather than the sitters' book.

The manner

The fancy pictures gave Reynolds a freedom the portraits did not: no sitter to satisfy, no likeness to keep, only a mood and a composition. The result is often his most purely painterly work — soft, warm, atmospheric — and also his most sentimental, in the eighteenth-century sense of the word: pictures of feeling, made to move. The Fortune-Teller belongs with the Rothschild collection's pictures of the picturesque at Waddesdon.

History

By descent and the Rothschild collection; Waddesdon Manor (National Trust).

What to look at

The young figures; the gypsy; the soft light; the sentiment. Then the Murillo behind the manner, and the print trade the picture fed.

Coda

A Fortune-Teller is Reynolds in the pastoral-genre mode — the fancy picture of the picturesque poor, painted for feeling and for the engraver — the side of the painter that furnished the age's parlours rather than its palaces.

The fancy pictures as a group

Reynolds's fancy pictures — the Strawberry Girl, Cupid as a Link-Boy, the Fortune-Teller, the beggar children, the shepherdesses — form a distinct strand of the œuvre, made not for sitters but for the market and the print trade, in the pastoral-genre tradition of Murillo (several of whose pictures Reynolds owned) and the age's sentimental taste for the picturesque poor. They gave the painter a freedom the portraits denied — no likeness to keep, only a mood — and they are often his most purely painterly work; they were also, through the mezzotints, among his most widely sold, furnishing the parlours of a public that could not commission a portrait.

Murillo and the picturesque poor

Reynolds owned and admired pictures by Murillo, the Spanish master of the picturesque beggar-child, and his own fancy pictures of gypsies, shepherdesses and street children descend from that tradition and the age's sentimental taste for the rural and the poor. The Fortune-Teller is a characteristic example — a scene of young figures and a soothsayer, painted for its mood and its light — and it belongs to the branch of the œuvre made for the print trade and the parlour rather than the sitters' book. The Waddesdon picture came to the Rothschilds with their taste for the decorative eighteenth century, and it hangs among the Bouchers and the Sèvres as a specimen of the popular, sentimental branch of Reynolds's art.

Charity (Ashmolean Museum): an allegorical picture of Charity with children, related to Reynolds's New College window designs.

Diana Sackville, Viscountess Crosbie (The Huntington Library): a full-length of a young woman in movement; at the Huntington.

Dr Joseph Warton (Ashmolean Museum): a portrait of the critic and headmaster of Winchester.

John Frederick Sackville, 3rd Duke of Dorset (National Trust): another portrait of the ambassador and cricketer.

John Musters (National Gallery of Art, Washington): a male portrait; Musters married the beauty Sophia Heywood.

The picture

Oil on canvas, 239 × 148 cm — National Gallery of Art, Washington (Andrew W. Mellon collection). Lady Elizabeth Delmé seated out of doors on a bank, her two small children against her — one leaning on her lap, one at her side — a dog at her feet, in a landscape with a stormy sky. A maternal group of the late 1770s and one of the Mellon Reynoldses that founded Washington's collection.

The maternal group

The picture is one of Reynolds's characteristic mother-and-children groups — the seated mother, the children clinging, the landscape and sky — in the mode of the Lady Cockburn but calmer and more pastoral. Lady Elizabeth, a daughter of the Earl of Carlisle, is shown as the tender centre of her family, the children arranged in the intertwined, affectionate grouping Reynolds favoured, against an English landscape that lends the scene the informal, natural air the age prized. It is a picture of maternal feeling in the Rousseauian key that Reynolds shared with Gainsborough and, across the Channel, with Vigée Le Brun.

The Mellon collection

The picture was among the English portraits Andrew Mellon bought in the 1920s and 30s and gave to found the National Gallery of Art in Washington — the Gilded Age and its successors having made the Reynolds grand portrait the definition of an old master to own. Washington's Reynoldses (this, the Lady Caroline Howard, the Lady Betty Hamilton) are the fruit of that taste.

History

By descent; Duveen; Andrew W. Mellon; the National Gallery of Art, Washington.

What to look at

The children clinging to the mother; the dog; the stormy sky; the pastoral bank. Then the Mellon gift, which brought the English grand manner to America's national collection.

Coda

Lady Elizabeth Delmé and her Children is Reynolds's maternal pastoral in its calm form — the mother and children in an English landscape, painted for feeling — and one of the pictures by which the American national collection was built on the Georgian portrait.

Reception

The Delmé group belongs to the Rousseauian moment in European portraiture — the cult of maternal feeling and the informal, natural family that Reynolds shared with Gainsborough in England and Vigée Le Brun in France — and it is one of the calmest and most pastoral of his mother-and-children pictures, the storm in the sky lending the tenderness below a touch of the sublime. Its acquisition by Andrew Mellon and gift to the National Gallery of Art made it one of the founding pictures of the American national collection.

The maternal pastoral

The seated mother with children clinging against a landscape and a stormy sky is one of Reynolds's recurring inventions, and the Delmé is among its calmest realisations — the family arranged in the intertwined, affectionate grouping the painter favoured, in the informal, natural mode that the age, following Rousseau, prized. Its acquisition by Andrew Mellon made it one of the founding pictures of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, and a monument to the American taste for the English grand portrait. The picture was engraved and much reproduced as a model of maternal feeling, and it remains one of Washington's best-loved English pictures.

Lady Gertrude Fitzpatrick (Lady Lever Art Gallery): a child portrait, sometimes called 'Collina'.

Miss Elizabeth Beauclerk as Una with the Lion (Harvard Art Museums): a fancy portrait of a child as Spenser's Una; a poetic child-picture.

Mrs Elisha Mathew (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston): a female portrait.