Sarah Bradley, Mrs William Ingram (National Trust): a female portrait.

Sir David Lindsay, 4th Bt of Evelick (National Galleries Scotland): a portrait of a Scottish baronet.

Sir Francis Blake Delaval, KB (National Trust): a portrait of the theatrical and dissipated Northumberland baronet, a friend of Garrick.

The 4th Duke of Queensberry ('Old Q') as Earl of March (Wallace Collection): a portrait of the notorious rake and gambler, in his youth; a Wallace Reynolds.

Thomas Reynolds, 2nd Lord Ducie (National Museum Cardiff): a portrait of a peer (no relation).

Walter Radcliffe (National Trust): a portrait of a Devon gentleman.

William Colyear, Viscount Milsington (private collection): a portrait of the son of the Earl of Portmore.

'Comedy': Study for 'David Garrick between Tragedy and Comedy' (Nationalmuseum, Stockholm): a study of the figure of Comedy for the famous 1761 picture (see the Waddesdon prime); a rare surviving study.

An Officer on Horseback (Dulwich Picture Gallery): an equestrian military portrait.

Anne, 2nd Countess of Albemarle (National Gallery): a portrait of the mother of Admiral Keppel, an old lady knotting, in one of Reynolds's finest early female portraits.

Charles Brandling (Indianapolis Museum of Art): a male portrait.

Charles Fitzroy, later 1st Baron Southampton (Royal Collection): a portrait of the courtier and soldier, a grandson of the 2nd Duke of Grafton.

Elizabeth Gunning, Baroness Hamilton and Duchess of Argyll (Yale Center for British Art): another portrait of the celebrated Gunning beauty; at Yale.

Elizabeth Gunning, Duchess of Hamilton and Argyll (Lady Lever Art Gallery): one of the celebrated Gunning sisters, the beauties whose faces conquered London society in the 1750s; a famous beauty of the age.

Jeremiah Dyson (Parliamentary Art Collection): a portrait of a clerk of the House of Commons.

Lady Maynard (Hunterian, Glasgow): a female portrait.

The picture

Oil on canvas — National Portrait Gallery, London. The most famous image of Laurence Sterne (1713–1768), painted in 1760 at the height of the sensation of Tristram Shandy: the clergyman-novelist leans on his hand, a manuscript before him, his long thin face turned to the viewer with the sidelong, quizzical look that the book had made the town's delight. Reynolds painted it in a few weeks of Sterne's arrival in London, and the engraving after it fixed Sterne's face for posterity.

Tristram's author

Sterne came to London in 1760 an overnight celebrity, the first two volumes of Tristram Shandy having made him the most talked-of writer in England, and he sat to Reynolds at once — the painter and the novelist recognising in each other the age's two great wits. The portrait is the visual equivalent of the book: informal, sly, intimate, the sitter caught mid-thought with a hand to his temple, the pose borrowed (as the educated saw) from the melancholy-thinker type but turned to comedy. It became, through the mezzotint, the image of Sterne, reproduced in every edition.

History

By descent and the market; the National Portrait Gallery. One of the pictures on which Reynolds's fame as the painter of the age's minds rests.

What to look at

The hand at the temple; the sidelong look; the manuscript; the thin clever face. Then think of the book, which the picture is.

Sterne, Reynolds, and celebrity

The Sterne is a document of a new thing — literary celebrity — and of Reynolds's instinct for it. Sterne became, on the publication of Tristram Shandy, the first modern literary sensation, mobbed and lionised in a London season, and Reynolds painted him at the peak of it, so that the portrait and the book made each other's fame. The mezzotint by Edward Fisher carried the image across Europe (Sterne was as famous in Paris as in London), and the sidelong, quizzical face became the frontispiece of the age's most experimental novel. The pose — the sitter leaning on his hand, a manuscript before him — is the melancholy-author type turned, like everything in Sterne, to comedy.

History

By descent and the market; the National Portrait Gallery. The picture is one of the foundations of Reynolds's reputation as the portraitist of the age's minds, and one of the few in which sitter and painter were so exactly matched in wit. Sterne died in London in 1768, poor and alone, eight years after the sitting; the portrait outlived him as the image of the wit the age had mobbed, and it is, with the Johnson and the Garrick, one of the three Reynolds portraits that fixed the faces of the English Enlightenment's literary men.

Reception and the print

Edward Fisher's mezzotint of 1761 carried the image across Europe and made it the universal face of Sterne; it was copied, pirated and adapted, and it remains the frontispiece of choice for Tristram Shandy. The picture is small and informal, without allusion or apparatus, and its intimacy is the measure of the friendship between two men who understood, better than anyone of their age, the uses of publicity and the comedy of the self.

Lord Ligonier (Tate/National Gallery): the great equestrian portrait of Field Marshal Ligonier, his horse in movement — one of Reynolds's finest military full-lengths, in the Van Dyck-Rubens equestrian tradition.

Mrs Angelo (Fitzwilliam Museum): a portrait of a member of the Angelo family of fencing-masters, friends of the artistic and theatrical world.

Mrs Anne Brudenell (Hunterian, Glasgow): a female portrait.

Mrs Frances Holburne (Holburne Museum, Bath): a female portrait of the Holburne family, whose collection founded the museum.

Mrs Robert Brudenell (Harvard Art Museums): a female portrait.

Captain Alexander Hood (private collection): a naval portrait of the future Lord Bridport (see the Greenwich Alexander Hood in the article entries).

Lady Juliana Colyear Dawkins (Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh): a female portrait.

William Ponsonby, 2nd Earl of Bessborough (private collection): a portrait of a collector and Grand Tourist, a member of the Society of Dilettanti.

Portrait of an Unknown Lady (North Lincolnshire Museum): an unidentified female sitter.

Robert Dodsley (Dulwich Picture Gallery): a portrait of the bookseller-poet, publisher of Johnson and Gray.

Stephen Croft, Junior (Art Gallery of New South Wales): a male portrait, in Sydney.

The 'Out of Town' Party (Bristol City Museum): a conversation-piece or caricature-group of gentlemen; a rare informal group.

Alexander, 4th Duke of Gordon (Eton College): a portrait of the Scottish magnate; at Eton.

Charles Bennet, Viscount Ossulston, later 4th Earl of Tankerville (Eton College): a portrait; at Eton.

The picture

Oil on canvas, 148 × 183 cm — Waddesdon Manor (National Trust). The actor David Garrick (1717–1779), the greatest of the age, stands between two allegorical women — Tragedy, stern and imploring, pulling him one way; Comedy, smiling and seductive, pulling him the other — as he turns, with a comic grimace of apology, toward Comedy. Reynolds's wittiest picture and a manifesto of the alliance between the stage and the Grand Manner.

The choice of Hercules

The composition is the antique 'Choice of Hercules' — the hero between Virtue and Vice — turned into a theatrical joke: Garrick, the master of both tragic and comic roles, caught in the act of choosing, his face apologising to Tragedy as his body inclines to Comedy. The two women are painted in two manners — Tragedy in the grand, Guido-Reni style, Comedy in the light, Correggesque — so that the picture is also a demonstration of the schools, and a comment on Garrick's own versatility. It is Reynolds's fullest fusion of portrait, allegory and wit, and it delighted the town.

Garrick and Reynolds

Garrick was Reynolds's friend and a founder-member of the Club; the two men, the painter and the actor, were the age's great impresarios of reputation, and the picture is their collaboration — the actor performing the choice, the painter staging it. Garrick reportedly haggled over the price, which the picture's fame made a good joke.

History

Painted for Garrick; the Rothschild collection at Waddesdon Manor (National Trust). One of Reynolds's most reproduced pictures through the mezzotint.

What to look at

Garrick's apologetic grimace; Tragedy's grand manner and Comedy's light one; the two styles in one canvas; the antique 'Choice' beneath the joke.

The two manners

The picture's cleverest stroke is its double style. Tragedy, at the left, is painted in the grand, dark, sculptural manner of Guido Reni and the Bolognese — the school of the sublime; Comedy, at the right, in the light, warm, seductive manner of Correggio and the Venetians — the school of grace. Garrick stands between not only two Muses but two theories of painting, and his choice is the painter's joke about his own art as much as about the actor's. It is the most explicit statement in the œuvre of Reynolds's knowledge of the schools, worn lightly, in a picture the whole town could enjoy.

History and fame

Painted for Garrick, who (the story runs) beat the price down; engraved by Fisher and endlessly reproduced; the Rothschild collection at Waddesdon Manor. It is Reynolds's wittiest picture and one of his most popular, the alliance of the stage and the Academy in a single canvas. The 'Choice of Hercules' behind the joke was a subject Reynolds's friend Shaftesbury had made famous as the type of the moral history painting; to give it to an actor choosing between his two lines of business was to domesticate the sublime into comedy, which is the picture's whole delighted argument.

Reception and versions

Fisher's mezzotint spread the composition, and it became one of Reynolds's most reproduced and most imitated inventions; the pairing of a real person with two allegorical figures in two styles was widely copied. The picture is the fullest demonstration of the essay's argument that Reynolds's learning was worn lightly — the whole apparatus of the schools deployed in the service of a joke the town could enjoy, and a compliment to the friend who was the age's greatest actor.

Henrietta Catherine Cholmley and her Son (Toledo Museum of Art): a maternal group, at Toledo.

Lady Anstruther (Tate/National Gallery): a female portrait in the national collections.

Major General Stringer Lawrence (British Library): a portrait of the 'father of the Indian army', Clive's commander; a military portrait of the East India Company's wars.

Maria Walpole, Duchess of Gloucester, with her Daughter (Condé Museum, Chantilly): a maternal group of the King's sister-in-law (Horace Walpole's niece); a Reynolds in France.

Captain John Foote in his Mughal Robes (York Museums Trust): a portrait of an East India Company officer in Indian dress — a document of the Company world and its cross-cultural dress, akin to the Mughal-costume portraits of the age.

Isabella Carr, later Countess of Erroll (Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts): a female portrait.

Mrs William Fortescue, later Countess of Clermont (National Gallery of Ireland): a female portrait.

The Ladies Amabel and Mary Jemima Yorke (Cleveland Museum of Art): a double portrait of two sisters, daughters of the Earl of Hardwicke; a child group.