XVIII. Four pictures, closely

Commodore Keppel, 1752–53 (Greenwich). The picture that made him. Keppel strides along a rocky shore, a storm and a wreck behind him, his cloak blowing, his right hand flung out — and the pose is the Apollo Belvedere's, reversed: the antique god of light given to a young naval officer on a real beach. London had seen full-lengths, but not this — the movement, the drama, the concentrated light on the face and the outflung hand, the composition lifted bodily from the most famous statue in Rome and made to serve a modern man. The Grand Manner had arrived in English portraiture, and the market understood at once what it was worth. The picture is Reynolds's manifesto: the likeness of a friend, raised by allusion to the heroic, painted with the Venetian light he had studied the year before.

Lady Sarah Bunbury Sacrificing to the Graces, 1765 (Chicago). A young woman — the beauty George III had wanted to marry — in a pseudo-classical robe, pouring a libation at an altar before three statues of the Graces, a companion behind her. The picture is the Grand Manner applied to a society beauty: Lady Sarah is a priestess, the composition is a Poussin, the meaning is a compliment (she sacrifices to the Graces, being one). It is also, characteristically, a picture in which the antique furniture and the real face do not quite agree — the head is a portrait, alert and particular, on a body doing something no Englishwoman ever did — and the disagreement is the Reynolds effect: the tension between the sitter and the role.

Mrs Siddons as the Tragic Muse, 1784 (Huntington). The actress Sarah Siddons, at the height of her fame as the tragedienne of Drury Lane, enthroned in a cloud with the figures of Pity and Terror behind her — and the pose is Michelangelo's Isaiah from the Sistine ceiling, which Reynolds had copied in 1750, given to a living actress; the painter signed his name on the hem of her robe, saying (Northcote reports) that he would go down to posterity on the skirts of Mrs Siddons. The picture is the summa of the Grand Manner: an actress, whose art is the passions, made into the Muse of Tragedy by way of a prophet on the Sistine ceiling, in a colour (dark, Rembrandtesque, glowing) that is the Venetian dream realised for once. It is Reynolds's masterpiece and the proof of the Discourses in a single canvas.

The Age of Innocence, c. 1788 (Tate). A small girl in white sits on a bank, her hands crossed on her breast, her hair loose, looking out with an expression of grave sweetness; behind her, a landscape and a sky. There is no allusion, no pose, no theory — only a child, and the title (added later) that made her Innocence itself. The picture was the most reproduced English painting of the nineteenth century, the emblem of Victorian childhood, and it has suffered for it: the sentiment that made it beloved made it, to the modern eye, saccharine, and the fading of the flesh has not helped. But it is worth seeing clear: a late Reynolds, painted when he was going blind, of a child (perhaps his great-niece Theophila) with the tenderness the fancy pictures always had and the Grand Manner had no room for — the particular, unraised, at last.

Omai, c. 1776 (private collection, on long loan). The young man from Ra'iatea whom Cook's second voyage brought to London in 1774 and whom society fêted for two years, painted full-length in white robes and a turban, barefoot, one tattooed hand raised, standing in an imagined tropical landscape — the Grand Manner given, with complete seriousness and no condescension, to a Polynesian. The pose is an antique orator's; the drapery is a Roman toga reimagined; the dignity is total. It is one of Reynolds's most beautiful pictures and one of his most complicated for a modern viewer: a masterpiece of the Grand Manner and a document of the first British encounter with the Pacific, of the age's fascination with the 'natural man', and of the questions — of display, of ownership, of who is looking at whom — that the encounter raises. The picture's long and contested modern history, its record price and the negotiation over its export and public display, have made it, two and a half centuries on, the Reynolds the present most argues about.

XIX. How to look at a Reynolds

Reconstruct the colour. The first fact about most Reynolds portraits is that they are not the colour he painted: the carmines have faded, the glazes have gone, the bitumen has darkened and cracked. Look at the mezzotint if there is one — it preserves the tonal design — and imagine the flesh warmer, the shadows more transparent, the whole more glowing than the ghost on the wall. The best-preserved pictures (the ones he painted plainly, without the fugitive tricks) show what he could do; the ruined ones show what he risked.

Find the source. Reynolds's poses are quotations, and the educated eye was meant to catch them: the antique statue, the Van Dyck, the Michelangelo, the Rembrandt. The quotation is not concealment but compliment — the sitter is being likened to a god, a saint, a hero — and the pleasure of a Reynolds is partly the pleasure of the allusion. Learn the Apollo Belvedere, the Medici Venus, Michelangelo's prophets and sibyls, Van Dyck's Charleses, and you will see them walk through the English eighteenth century in silk.

Read the tone before the colour. Reynolds composed in light and dark, as the Venetian notebook taught him: the head lit, the shadows massed, the eye led to the face by the fall of light. The structure survives the fading; look at where the light is and what it does.

Look at the head, and then at everything else. The head is Reynolds's; the drapery and the background are often the studio's. The face is where the painter is, and the faces — Johnson's pug intelligence, Siddons's tragic calm, the children's gravity, the beauties' cool — are the achievement. The rest is the machine that let him paint so many.

And hold the theory and the practice together. The Discourses tell you what Reynolds thought painting should be; the pictures tell you what he could do. The distance between them is not hypocrisy; it is the working life of a portraitist who believed in history and painted faces, and who raised the face, by every device of allusion and light and design he could command, as far toward history as it would go.

Coda

He said the last word he wished to speak in the Academy should be the name of Michelangelo, and he said it, in December 1790, going blind, to the students of the school he had built. It is the right emblem for him: the portraitist who worshipped the history painter he could not be, the Englishman who gave his provincial, commercial, face-painting country a theory of the ideal and a place in the line of Raphael. The pictures fade; the theory is argued against; the borrowed poses can be counted and mocked. But the achievement stands in the catalogue that follows — three thousand faces of a governing nation, painted in one grand manner over forty years by a deaf, genial, relentless man in Leicester Fields, who made painting in England a profession and left it an academy, a literature, and a way of looking at a face that lasted until the camera. The Britain of Johnson and Burke and Garrick and Siddons has the countenance Reynolds gave it, and will keep it.

One last measure of the man. When he died, the Academy he had made buried him among the kings and the poets in St Paul's, and the class he had painted for forty years walked behind the coffin; but the surest monument was the one he could not have foreseen — that two centuries later the faces would still be the faces, that a nation would still see its eighteenth century through his eyes, and that the argument he began with Blake, between the general and the particular, the ideal and the face, would still be worth having. He lost the argument in theory, perhaps: the future belonged to the particular, to Constable's clouds and the camera's exactness, not to the Grand Manner's borrowed gods. But he won it in practice, one sitter at a time, because the particular faces he set down — raised, lit, alluded-to, and exact — are the ones that survived the theory, the fading, and the mockery, and are alive on the walls still. That is the achievement the catalogue records, picture by picture, face by face — some three thousand sittings across forty-five years, distilled here into the pictures Wikidata preserves, from the young Keppel striding on his shore to the last blind year.