XV. The quarrels, the blindness, and the end

The presidency was not all dignity. Reynolds ruled the Academy for twenty-two years, but the last were embittered. He quarrelled with the Academicians in 1790 over the election of a professor of perspective — a small matter that became a test of his authority — and resigned the presidency in February 1790, in a fury, before being coaxed back a month later; the episode showed how much the office had come to mean to him and how little the younger men would grant. His relations with the King were never warm — George III preferred Ramsay and then, grudgingly, others, and made Reynolds Principal Painter only on Ramsay's death in 1784, with the remark that he was 'not a very good painter' — and the court commissions went elsewhere. His sister Frances left the household after years of friction. And in July 1789 the calamity came: the sight of his left eye failed, suddenly, over a few weeks — a detached retina or a haemorrhage — and within months he could not see to paint. He laid down the brush in 1789, after forty-five years and some three thousand pictures, and did not take it up again. The last Discourse, the fifteenth, was delivered in December 1790 to the students, a valediction ending on the name of Michelangelo; a story, probably embroidered, has a beam of the Academy's room cracking as he spoke, an omen the audience felt. He declined through 1791 with a disease of the liver, in good spirits and much visited, and died at Leicester Fields on 23 February 1792. He left a fortune, a great collection, an unmarried niece as his heir, and an Academy that buried him as no English painter had been buried.

XVI. The reception: from apotheosis to Blake to the moderns

The critical history is a pendulum. In his lifetime Reynolds was the summit — the President, the theorist, the painter the aristocracy queued for, the friend of the great; the funeral in St Paul's was the age's verdict. The generation after him canonised the Discourses: they were the text of the Academy schools, reprinted, translated, quoted, the foundation of English art teaching, and Reynolds was 'the founder of the English school', the Raphael of Britain. The Romantic reaction, when it came, was ferocious and it came from the artists. Blake's marginalia (c. 1808) are the great dissent — Reynolds as the enemy of inspiration, the hireling of a corrupt establishment, the preacher of a 'general nature' that Blake, who believed in the 'minute particular', held to be the death of art: 'To Generalize is to be an Idiot.' Hazlitt, more measured, admired the pictures and doubted the theory. The Pre-Raphaelites made 'Sir Sloshua' the emblem of everything they rejected — the brown gravy of the academic manner, the borrowed pose, the fading glaze — and their name was a flag against him.

The Victorian public, meanwhile, loved the pictures the artists scorned: the Age of Innocence, the Infant Samuel, the Strawberry Girl, Miss Bowles were the most reproduced images in England, the fancy pictures of childhood that furnished the nursery and the biscuit-tin. The connoisseurs of the late nineteenth century (the great collectors, the dealers, the American buyers) drove Reynolds's prices to the top of the market — the Duchess of Devonshire, the child pictures, the beauties went to the Fricks and the Huntingtons and the Rothschilds — and the Reynolds portrait of a Georgian lady became, in the Gilded Age, the definition of an old master to own.

The twentieth century divided. The formalists and the modernists found him academic and derivative — the borrowed poses, the theory, the finish — and preferred Gainsborough's touch. The art historians rehabilitated the mind: Edgar Wind's essays on Reynolds's 'borrowings' (from the 1930s) showed that the quotations from the antique and the Old Masters were not theft or pedantry but a deliberate rhetoric — the 'visual quotation' that raised the sitter by allusion, an iconography for a learned public — and Ernst Gombrich, Robert Rosenblum and Nicholas Penny built on it; the great 1986 Royal Academy exhibition (Penny) and David Mannings's complete catalogue of the paintings (2000) put the study on a modern footing. The present estimate is high and qualified: Reynolds is seen as the maker of the English school and the author of its theory; as a portraitist of the first rank whose best pictures — the Grand-Manner groups, the Club portraits, the children, the actresses — are among the century's finest; as a painter whose technical recklessness cost the œuvre dearly; and as a mind whose Discourses, whatever their distance from his practice, remain the most intelligent defence of the academic ideal in English. Blake's dissent is honoured too: the quarrel between the general and the particular that Reynolds and Blake conducted is one of the permanent arguments about art, and Reynolds is its most eloquent defender of the general.

XVII. The sitters' book: a portrait of a society

No document of the eighteenth century is quite like Reynolds's pocket-books. Kept from 1755 to the end, and preserved almost complete at the Royal Academy, they record, day by day, hour by hour, the name of every person who sat — the appointment, the time, sometimes the fee, sometimes a note — and they are, in aggregate, a portrait of the English governing class over thirty-five years, drawn by the traffic through one room. Read them and the society assembles: the same great names return year after year as their families grow and their fortunes turn; the soldiers appear in the war years and the widows after; the actresses cluster around their triumphs; the children of the 1760s come back as the sitters of the 1780s; the deaths thin the columns. The books have been mined by historians for the chronology of the pictures — a portrait can often be dated to the week — and by social historians for the shape of the class, and they are the reason this catalogue can date so many works so exactly.

They also record the pace. In the busy years — the late 1750s, the 1760s, the 1770s — the books show five, six, seven sitters a day, six days a week, month after month: a rate that only the studio system could sustain, and that explains both the quantity of the œuvre and its unevenness. A face at nine, another at ten, another at eleven; the drapery to Toms, the replica to Marchi, the print to McArdell; the dinner at four with Johnson and Burke. The books are the machine's log, and they show a man who worked, by choice, almost every day of a long life, and who found in the endless procession of faces not a burden but the element he lived in — the deaf, watchful, sociable observer, taking the likeness of his age one hour at a time.

The sitters' book is, finally, the answer to the charge that Reynolds was a mere face-painter. He was a face-painter; but the faces, taken together, are the thing no history painting of his century achieved — the actual countenance of a nation at the moment it became a world power, its statesmen and its courtesans and its children and its admirals, set down by one hand in one manner, and preserved, in the pictures and the prints and the pocket-books, as completely as any society has ever been preserved by an artist. The Discourses argued for the general; the sitters' book is the particular, and it is the particular that survives.

The books survive in the Royal Academy and in the Cottonian and Fitzwilliam collections, and they have been published and indexed; with David Mannings's complete catalogue of the paintings (2000), which correlates the sittings with the surviving pictures, they make Reynolds the best-documented painter of his century. The catalogue that follows leans on both: where a picture can be dated by a sitting, it is; where the sitter's identity is secure, it is given; and where the books and the canvases disagree — as they sometimes do, a portrait begun for one sitter and finished for another, or a replica entered as an original — the entry says so. The apparatus is the point: a painter this documented can be read as a life, day by day, and the pictures fall into place along the line of the books.