X. The Academy and the Discourses

The Royal Academy was founded on 10 December 1768, by the King's charter, after years of quarrels among the older exhibiting societies; thirty-six founder-members chose Reynolds as their first President, and the King knighted him in April 1769 — the second English painter, after Thornhill, to be knighted, and the first as a matter of the office. Reynolds held the presidency for twenty-two years, until a month before his death, and he made the institution: its schools, with the life class and the study from the antique; its annual summer exhibition, the public event that created the London art market; its library and its professorships; and its intellectual authority, which rested on the Discourses.

The fifteen Discourses on Art were delivered to the students, at the prize-givings, between 1769 and 1790 — the first seven annually, then at longer intervals — and published as they came; together they are the fullest statement of academic art theory in English and the founding document of British art education. Their argument is consistent and it is the Grand Manner's. Art is not the imitation of particular nature but the representation of 'general nature' — the ideal form abstracted from the accidents of the individual, 'the great style' that the ancients and the Italians of the High Renaissance achieved. The painter learns this not from nature directly but from the masters: he studies Raphael for design, Michelangelo for sublimity, the antique for form, and he forms his own manner by the assimilation of theirs — 'the highest ambition of every Artist is to be thought a man of Genius', but genius is the fruit of labour and learning, not of untutored inspiration. The portrait, and the other 'lower' branches — landscape, still life, the Dutch manner — are ranked below history painting, the representation of great human actions in the great style. And the taste that judges all this is not personal caprice but a real standard, grounded in the consensus of the learned across time.

The Discourses have been read, ever since, against the pictures, and the contradiction is real and productive. Reynolds preached history and painted portraits; preached the general and made his living by the particular face; ranked the Venetians' colour below the Romans' design and spent his life chasing Titian's glow; told the students to shun the mechanical and the meretricious and used bitumen and wax and fugitive lakes for effect. Blake, who hated him, wrote his fury in the margins of the Discourses — 'This Man was Hired to Depress Art'; 'Such Advice as this would make a Man a Fool or a Knave' — and read the whole enterprise as the murder of English genius by cosmopolitan good taste. The kinder modern reading, from Wind and Gombrich onward, is that the Discourses are not a description of Reynolds's practice but its conscience: the statement of an ideal against which the working portraitist measured, and knowingly fell short of, his daily trade — and that the tension between the theory's ambition and the practice's realism is exactly what makes Reynolds's best pictures more than likenesses. The portrait that alludes to Michelangelo is the Discourses' argument in paint: the particular raised, for a moment, toward the general.

The Discourses also did a practical thing: they gave the English painter a genealogy and a dignity. By placing British art in the line of Raphael and the antique, by treating the painter as a learned man with a theory, by making the Academy a body that dined with statesmen and buried its President in St Paul's, Reynolds accomplished what Richardson had only imagined — he made painting in England a liberal profession. Every English painter after him, including those (Blake, Constable, Turner in part) who rebelled against the doctrine, worked in the institution he built.

XI. The Club, the friends, and the man

Reynolds's second institution was the Club — 'the Literary Club', founded in 1764 at his suggestion, meeting at the Turk's Head in Gerrard Street, with nine original members: Reynolds, Johnson, Burke, Goldsmith, and their friends, later joined by Garrick, Boswell, Gibbon, Adam Smith, Sheridan, Charles James Fox, Thomas Warton. It was the intellectual centre of the age, and Reynolds was its founder and its social glue — the deaf painter with the ear-trumpet who liked everyone, quarrelled with no one, and painted them all. His friendship with Johnson, from 1756 to Johnson's death in 1784, was the closest of his life; Johnson dedicated work to him, stayed in his house, and shaped the prose of the Discourses (the old charge that Johnson or Burke wrote them is false — the ideas and the writing are Reynolds's — but Johnson read and corrected). Reynolds painted Johnson five times, Goldsmith, Garrick between Tragedy and Comedy, Burke, Boswell, Sterne, Gibbon; the portraits of the Club are the visual record of the English Enlightenment, and they are among the painter's best, because with his friends he dropped the Grand Manner and painted the face.

The man is knowable, unusually, from the outside: from Boswell's Life of Johnson, in which Reynolds is a constant presence; from Northcote's Memoirs; from Frances Reynolds's bruised recollections; from the letters; from Goldsmith's affectionate mockery. He was deaf from Rome, and the deafness made him watchful and a little detached; he was greedy for society and careful of it; he was ambitious, industrious (the sitters' books show almost no idle days), and shrewd about money and rank; he was, said everyone, equable to the point of coldness — 'invulnerable'. He never married; the household was his sisters' and his niece's; the emotional life, if there was one, is not in the record. He collected old masters (a great collection, sold after his death), drove the painted coach, gave dinners, went deaf and, in July 1789, blind in one eye — 'my eye is gone', he wrote — and stopped painting. He resigned the presidency in a quarrel over an election in 1790, was persuaded back, delivered the last Discourse in December 1790 with the ceiling of the Academy's room (it was said) cracking overhead, and died on 23 February 1792 of a disease of the liver, aged sixty-eight. Burke wrote the notice; the funeral was a state's.

XII. Rivals: Gainsborough, Ramsay, Romney, and the English school

Reynolds did not work alone, and the shape of his achievement is clearer against his rivals. Allan Ramsay, the Scot, was the better draughtsman and the King's preferred painter until he retired; his portraits of women have a delicacy Reynolds's lack. Thomas Gainsborough was the great antagonist — the painter of the flickering, feathery brush, the silvery English light, the landscape backgrounds, the sitters caught in movement, against Reynolds's Italian gravity and borrowed poses. They were temperamental opposites and professional rivals; Gainsborough exhibited at the Academy and then withdrew in a quarrel over the hanging of his pictures; they were never friends. Yet when Gainsborough was dying in 1788 he sent for Reynolds, and Reynolds came, and the Fourteenth Discourse, delivered that December, is Reynolds's assessment of his rival — generous, exact, and a little rueful: Gainsborough's 'manner of forming all the parts of a picture together', his truth to English nature, his 'portraits of a nation', set against the Grand Manner's ideal, with the implication that each had something the other lacked. George Romney, the third man, undercut them both in price and for a decade outsold Reynolds in the fashionable market; Reynolds, who never named him, called him 'the man in Cavendish Square'. Behind them came the school Reynolds's Academy trained — Lawrence, who inherited the practice; Hoppner; Beechey; Opie; and the history painters (West, Barry, Fuseli, Copley) who tried to realise the Discourses' programme and mostly failed at the box office. The English school that the nineteenth century exported to the world — the grand portrait, the fancy picture, the sentiment — was Reynolds's making, for good and ill.

XIII. The history painter manqué: Ugolino, the Cartoons, and the great failures

The Discourses ranked history painting above all, and Reynolds, who had made his fortune and his name in portraiture, tried, late and repeatedly, to practise what he preached. The results are the most instructive failures in the œuvre. Ugolino and his Children in the Dungeon (1773, Knole) — the starving count of Dante's and the age's imagination, surrounded by his dying sons — was Reynolds's bid for the sublime, worked up from a study of a beggar's head into a full history piece and exhibited to acclaim; it is now a bituminous ruin, cracked and darkened, and even in its day the critics felt the strain of a portraitist reaching for Michelangelo. The Death of Dido (1781, Royal Collection), The Infant Hercules Strangling the Serpents (1786–89, Hermitage) — painted for Catherine the Great, a vast allegory of the infant Russian empire crushing its enemies, in which Reynolds put his whole theory and much bitumen — and the religious pictures for the west window of New College, Oxford (the Nativity and the Virtues, designed to be executed in glass by Jervais) are the others. They are ambitious, learned, and, as paintings, mostly inert: the Grand Manner, which lived in Reynolds's portraits as allusion and light, died in his histories as pastiche. The lesson is the essay's thesis in reverse: Reynolds's genius was for the face raised toward history, not for history itself, and when he abandoned the sitter for the subject he abandoned the thing he could do.

The New College window and the Catherine commission show the ambition's reach — an English painter designing stained glass for a medieval chapel in the grand style, and painting an imperial allegory for the Russian court — and the Infant Hercules, still in the Hermitage, is the monument to it: enormous, dark, cracked, admired by Catherine, and unloved since. Reynolds knew, at some level, what he was: the Fourteenth Discourse's generous verdict on Gainsborough — that the truth to nature might outweigh the grand style — reads, in the light of the histories, like a concession wrung from experience.

XIV. The drawings, the prints, and the reproduced painter

Reynolds is the least graphic of the great portraitists — he drew little, kept few drawings, and composed with the brush — and the works on paper in this catalogue are accordingly few: a handful of Italian studies, some compositional sketches, the caricatures. What multiplied him was the print. He grasped, earlier and more completely than any painter of his century, that the mezzotint — the dark, tonal, velvety English engraving process — could carry his pictures to a public the pictures themselves could never reach, and that the reproduction was both an income and a reputation. He cultivated the great mezzotinters — James McArdell (of whom he said 'by this man I shall be immortalised'), Edward Fisher, James Watson, Valentine Green, John Raphael Smith, William Dickinson — and some four hundred plates were scraped after him and sold across Europe and America. The prints made his compositions the common stock of the English school; they made the Infant Samuel and the Strawberry Girl into images everyone knew; and — the conservator's debt — they preserved the tonal design of pictures that have since faded, so that the mezzotint is often the truest surviving record of what a Reynolds looked like when it was new. To study Reynolds is, in large part, to study his prints.