Hester Thrale and her Daughter (Beaverbrook Art Gallery, Canada): a maternal group of Johnson's friend and hostess Mrs Thrale with her daughter 'Queeney'.

Mrs Jelf Powis and her Daughter (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston): a maternal group.

A Woman, presumed Mrs James Fox (Indianapolis Museum of Art): a female portrait.

Richard Robinson, Baron Rokeby, Archbishop of Armagh (Christ Church, Oxford): another portrait of the Irish primate.

Sarah Campbell (Yale Center for British Art): a female portrait.

Self-portrait (National Trust): a self-portrait.

Sir William Hamilton (National Portrait Gallery): a portrait of the envoy at Naples, antiquary and husband of Emma; the collector of the Greek vases.

Sketch for 'The 4th Duke of Marlborough and his Family' (Tate/National Gallery): a sketch for the great Blenheim group portrait.

The Banished Lord (Tate/National Gallery): a fancy head of a bearded man, a 'character' subject.

The picture

Oil on canvas, 240 × 148 cm — Tate (and National Gallery). A full-length of Mary Monckton (1748–1840), the celebrated bluestocking and hostess, in a shimmering dress with feathers in her hair, seated or standing in a lush garden with exotic flowers, in a picture of unusually vivid, almost hectic colour. A portrait of one of the age's great salonnières.

The bluestocking

Mary Monckton, later Countess of Cork, kept one of the most famous salons in London — Johnson, Burke, Reynolds and the wits attended — and was known for her eccentricity, her wit and her later longevity (she lived to ninety-one, a relic of the age of Johnson into the age of Dickens, who is said to have drawn on her for Mrs Leo Hunter). Reynolds painted her at about thirty, in a picture of extravagant colour and floral setting that matches the sitter's reputation for the flamboyant.

The colour

The Miss Monckton is among Reynolds's most vividly coloured pictures — the dress, the feathers, the exotic flowers of the garden in a heightened, almost artificial key — and it has been read as the painter matching his palette to the sitter's flamboyance. It is a picture in which Reynolds, usually the master of the sober and the grand, indulges the decorative and the bright.

History

By descent and the market; acquired for the nation, shared between Tate and the National Gallery.

What to look at

The feathers; the shimmering dress; the exotic flowers; the hectic colour. Then the salon the sitter kept, and the ninety-one years she lived.

Reception

The Miss Monckton is among the most vividly coloured of Reynolds's female full-lengths — the feathered hair, the shimmering dress, the exotic garden in a heightened key — and it has been read as the painter matching his palette to a sitter famous for her flamboyance and her wit. Mary Monckton's salon was one of the age's great gathering-places for the men Reynolds painted — Johnson, Burke, the wits of the Club — and her extraordinarily long life carried the memory of that world into the Victorian age; Reynolds's portrait catches her at the height of her flamboyant prime, in a picture that lets the usually grave painter indulge the decorative and the bright.

Coda

Miss Monckton is Reynolds's portrait of a bluestocking as a flamboyant — a hostess of the age of Johnson given a setting of exotic flowers and a palette of unusual brilliance, the decorative side of a painter better known for the grave.

The salon and the colour

Mary Monckton's salon gathered the wits and writers of the age of Johnson, and Reynolds — who attended it — painted her in a picture whose extravagant colour matches her reputation for the flamboyant: the feathered hair, the shimmering dress, the exotic flowers of the garden in a heightened, almost artificial key. It is among the most vividly coloured of his female full-lengths, and it lets the usually grave painter indulge the decorative and the bright. Shared between Tate and the National Gallery, it is the record of a salon that gathered the very faces this catalogue collects.

The picture

Oil on canvas — Musée Fabre, Montpellier (a version; the composition exists in several). A small boy kneels in prayer, his hands clasped, his face raised, in a dark setting lit by a soft light — the child Samuel of the Book of Samuel, answering the Lord's call in the night ('Speak, for thy servant heareth'). One of the most reproduced images of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the type of Reynolds's 'fancy picture' of childhood piety.

The fancy picture

The Infant Samuel is the fancy picture at its purest — a single child in a role and a mood, painted for the market and for the engraver rather than for a sitter — and it was among the most successful images Reynolds ever made: engraved, copied, reproduced on porcelain and in needlework, hung in nurseries and Sunday schools across two centuries. The kneeling child in prayer, lit from above, is a compound of the Italian devotional picture and the age's cult of childhood innocence, and it became the visual definition of pious childhood.

The versions and the fading

The composition exists in several autograph and studio versions (the Fabre's among them, with others at the Tate, the Fitzwilliam and elsewhere), reflecting the demand; and, like many of Reynolds's most-loved pictures, it has often suffered from the fugitive media that gave it its soft glow. The image's very popularity — the biscuit-tin ubiquity it achieved — has made it hard to see freshly, but the invention is a real one: a child's prayer given the gravity of a sacred subject.

History

The composition was painted from about 1776; versions are in Montpellier (Musée Fabre), London, Cambridge and elsewhere. Engraved repeatedly.

What to look at

The clasped hands; the raised face; the light from above; the dark ground. Then the two centuries of reproductions, which are the picture's real history.

Coda

The Infant Samuel is Reynolds's most popular invention and the ancestor of the Victorian nursery picture: a child's prayer raised to a sacred subject, reproduced past the point of visibility, and still, when seen clear, a tender and serious thing.

Reynolds and the pious child

The Infant Samuel fixed a type — the praying child, lit from above in a dark setting — that the nineteenth century made ubiquitous and that descends, through the reproductions, to the sentimental religious art of the Victorian age; Millais's Bubbles, a Reynolds fancy picture a century on and an advertisement for soap, is the type's ultimate fate. Seen apart from the reproductions, the picture is a serious invention: a child's prayer given the gravity of a scriptural subject, in the tradition of the Italian devotional picture Reynolds had studied in Rome, and painted with the soft light and the tenderness that made it, for two centuries, the image of pious childhood in the English-speaking world. The Musée Fabre's version is one of several; the composition's ubiquity in engraving, needlework and porcelain made it, for two centuries, among the most widely diffused images any English painter produced.

The engraving and the afterlife

Through the mezzotint and the countless copies, the Infant Samuel became one of the most widely diffused images of the age — a fixture of nurseries, Sunday schools and cottage walls across the English-speaking world for a century and more — and its very ubiquity has made it hard to see as the serious devotional invention it is. The Musée Fabre's version, one of several, is a reminder that the composition was in demand from the moment it appeared.

The Masters Gawler (Birmingham Museums): a double portrait of two boys.

The Reading Boy (National Museum of Fine Arts): a fancy head of a boy reading.

William Markham, Archbishop of York (Christ Church, Oxford): another version of the archbishop.

William Pitcairn (Royal College of Physicians): a portrait of the physician.

Charlotte, Lady Williams-Wynn (National Museum Cardiff): a female portrait.

Girl Leaning on a Pedestal (The Laughing Girl) (Kenwood House): a fancy picture of a laughing girl, in the Iveagh Bequest.

The Society of Dilettanti (first group) (Society of Dilettanti): the first of Reynolds's two group portraits of the club of Grand Tourists, gentlemen round a table with wine and gems.

The Society of Dilettanti (second group) (Society of Dilettanti): the second group, with Sir William Hamilton displaying a Greek vase — the finer of the two conversation-pieces.

Jane Fleming, later Countess of Harrington (The Huntington Library): a full-length of a young woman; at the Huntington.

The picture

Oil on canvas, 143 × 113 cm — National Gallery of Art, Washington (Andrew W. Mellon collection). A small girl — Lady Caroline Howard, daughter of the 5th Earl of Carlisle — kneels beside a stone urn of roses, reaching to pick one, in a warm coat against a landscape; she looks out at the viewer with a child's grave directness. One of Reynolds's finest child portraits and a Mellon Reynolds in Washington.

The child

Lady Caroline, about five, is painted with the seriousness and the design Reynolds gave children: the pose (reaching for the rose) is natural and characteristic, the coat and cap are a child's finery, the face is watched with tenderness and without sentimentality. The rose she reaches for is the age's emblem of transient youth — the child and the flower, both fleeting — but the picture wears the symbolism lightly; it is, first, a portrait of a real, grave, slightly wary little girl.

The manner

Reynolds's child portraits are among his surest achievements because the child released him from the Grand Manner's machinery into direct observation, tempered by design; the Lady Caroline is a model of the type — a single child, a simple action, a landscape, a face — and its restraint is its strength. It belongs with the Miss Bowles, the Master Hare and the Age of Innocence as the tender core of the œuvre.

History

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

What to look at

The reaching hand; the rose; the grave child's face; the warm coat. Then the flower's emblem of transience, worn lightly, and the real child beneath it.

Coda

Lady Caroline Howard is Reynolds's child portrait at its purest and most tender — a grave little girl reaching for a rose, painted with a design that never overwhelms the observation, and one of the images by which the American national collection holds the English portrait.

Reception

The Lady Caroline Howard is among the best-loved of Reynolds's child portraits, reproduced and admired as the type of the grave, watched child — the reaching hand, the rose, the wary little face — and it shows the painter at his surest, released by the child from the Grand Manner's apparatus into direct and tender observation. The rose the child reaches for carries, lightly, the age's emblem of transient youth, but the picture never insists on the symbol; it is first a portrait of a real little girl of the Carlisle family.

The child and the flower

The reaching hand and the rose give the picture its action and its emblem — the child and the flower, both fleeting — but Reynolds wears the symbolism lightly, and the picture is first a portrait of a real, grave, slightly wary little girl of the Carlisle family. It is among the surest of the child portraits, released by its subject from the Grand Manner's machinery into direct observation, and one of the Mellon Reynoldses by which the American national collection holds the Georgian portrait. The picture was engraved and has been reproduced ever since as one of the tenderest images of childhood in English art.

Mr Huddesford and Mr Bampfylde (Tate/National Gallery): a double portrait of two young men, one holding a bow.

John Hely-Hutchinson, Provost of Trinity (National Gallery of Ireland): a portrait of the Provost of Trinity College Dublin.

The picture

Oil on canvas — Royal Collection, Windsor. A history painting: Dido, the Queen of Carthage, dying on her pyre after Aeneas's departure, attended by her sister Anna and by Iris descending to release her soul, in the manner of the Italian and French history picture. One of Reynolds's ambitious essays in the highest genre, and one of the pictures by which he tried to practise the Discourses' doctrine.

The history painter's ambition

The Discourses ranked history painting — the representation of great actions in the grand style — above portraiture, and Reynolds, having made his name and fortune in the lower genre, tried repeatedly in his later years to paint history: the Ugolino, the Infant Hercules, the New College window, and this Death of Dido. The subject, from the Aeneid, is the tragic suicide of the abandoned queen, and Reynolds painted it in the borrowed grand manner of the Bolognese and the French, with the descending Iris and the mourning sister. It was bought by George III's family for the Royal Collection.

The verdict

The histories are the essay's instructive failures: learned, ambitious, and mostly inert, they show that Reynolds's genius was for the face raised toward history, not for history itself. The Death of Dido is more successful than some — the dying queen has real pathos, and the colour is rich — but it lacks the life the portraits command, and it has suffered, like the other late histories, from the fugitive media. It stands as evidence of the ambition the Discourses set and the practice could not quite meet.

History

Painted 1778; the Royal Collection since the eighteenth century.

What to look at

The dying Dido; the descending Iris; the mourning Anna; the pyre. Then the ambition — the portraitist reaching for history — and the distance between the reach and the grasp.

Coda

The Death of Dido is Reynolds the would-be history painter: the Discourses' doctrine put into practice in a tragic subject from Virgil, learned and ambitious and not quite alive — the instructive shortfall that measures where his real genius lay.

The late histories

The Death of Dido belongs with the Ugolino, the Infant Hercules painted for Catherine the Great, and the New College window as Reynolds's sustained late attempt to practise the history painting his Discourses ranked above all — and, like them, it demonstrates that his genius lay elsewhere. The subject is treated in the borrowed grand manner of the Bolognese and the French, with real pathos in the dying figure but without the life the portraits command; and it has suffered, like the other histories, from the fugitive media that darkened and cracked them.

The ambition and the shortfall

Reynolds's late histories are the record of an ambition the Discourses set and the practice could not quite meet: to paint great actions in the grand style, as Raphael and the Bolognese had. The Death of Dido is more successful than the Ugolino or the Infant Hercules in its pathos, but it lacks the life the portraits command, and it has darkened with the fugitive media. It stands, in the Royal Collection, as the evidence of where Reynolds's genius did not lie — and, by contrast, of where it did.

The Hon. Theresa Robinson, Mrs Parker, and her Son (National Trust): a maternal group of the Saltram Parkers.

Admiral Augustus Keppel (Royal Museums Greenwich): another Greenwich Keppel.

Admiral the Hon. Samuel Barrington (Royal Museums Greenwich): a naval portrait.

Augustus Keppel, Viscount Keppel (National Portrait Gallery): another portrait of Reynolds's friend.

George III (Royal Academy of Arts): the King's portrait for the Academy he founded.

George III (Parliamentary Art Collection): a version of the King's portrait.

Lady Jane Halliday (Waddesdon Manor): a full-length of a young woman; at Waddesdon.

Lady Louisa Manners (Kenwood House): a full-length of a young woman, later Countess of Dysart; in the Iveagh Bequest.

The picture

Oil on canvas, 236 × 144 cm — Harewood House, Yorkshire. A full-length of Seymour Dorothy, Lady Worsley (1758–1818), in a riding habit modelled on the scarlet uniform of her husband's regiment — a tight-waisted scarlet coat with gold, a plumed hat — striding against a stormy landscape. One of Reynolds's most dashing female portraits and the image of a woman whose scandal became the sensation of the age.

The riding habit

The military-style riding habit — scarlet, gold-frogged, plumed, echoing the uniform of Sir Richard Worsley's South Hampshire Militia — gives the portrait a dash and a swagger unusual in the female portraits: Lady Worsley is painted with the confidence of a cavalry officer, striding, gloved, against wind and cloud. The scarlet is among Reynolds's boldest female colour, and the whole is a picture of a spirited, fashionable young woman at the height of her assurance.

The scandal

In 1782 Lady Worsley's affair with a Captain Bisset became the most notorious scandal of the decade: her husband sued Bisset for damages, and the trial — at which it emerged that Sir Richard had connived at his wife's affairs, and had once held her up to a window to let Bisset watch her bathe — became a public sensation, ruining the husband's reputation more than the wife's and reducing the damages to a single shilling. The dashing portrait of 1779 is the image of the woman before the scandal, and its scarlet swagger reads, in retrospect, as the confidence of someone who would soon defy the whole convention.

History

By descent; Harewood House, the Lascelles family's seat, where it hangs among the house's Reynoldses.

What to look at

The scarlet riding habit; the plumed hat; the stride; the stormy sky. Then the scandal three years off, and the defiance the swagger seems to promise.

Coda

Lady Worsley is Reynolds's most dashing female portrait — a spirited young woman in a scarlet riding habit, painted with a cavalry officer's swagger — and, in the light of the scandal that followed, an unwitting image of a woman who would defy her age.

Reception

The Lady Worsley has become, since the scandal it preceded was retold in recent popular history, one of the most famous of Reynolds's female portraits — the dashing scarlet riding habit reading, in the light of the sitter's later defiance of every convention of her age, as an unwitting portrait of a rebel. As a painting it is among his boldest in colour and movement, the scarlet-and-gold habit and the plumed hat giving a woman the swagger of a cavalry officer against a stormy sky; it hangs at Harewood among the Lascelles family's Reynoldses.

The riding habit and the scandal

The scarlet riding habit, modelled on the uniform of her husband's militia, gives Lady Worsley the swagger of a cavalry officer, and the picture is among Reynolds's boldest in colour and movement; painted in 1779, it precedes by three years the criminal-conversation trial that made the sitter and her connived-at adulteries the sensation of the decade. The dashing image of the woman before the scandal reads, in retrospect, as the portrait of a coming rebel, and it hangs at Harewood among the Lascelles Reynoldses.

Queen Charlotte (Royal Academy of Arts): the Queen's portrait for the Academy.

Richard Robinson, Archbishop of Armagh (Barber Institute): another portrait of the Irish primate.

Sir John Macpherson, Governor-General of India (National Galleries Scotland): a portrait of the acting Governor-General between Hastings and Cornwallis.

Theory (Royal Academy of Arts): Reynolds's allegorical ceiling roundel for the Royal Academy's library — a female figure of Theory holding a scroll ('Theory is the knowledge of what is truly Nature'); a rare decorative allegory and a statement of the Academy's intellectual purpose.

Admiral Viscount Keppel (Tate/National Gallery): another portrait of Keppel.

Anne, Viscountess Townshend (Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco): a female portrait.

Charity (National Trust): a version of the Charity allegory.