Reynolds, Joshua
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- Reynolds, Joshua
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(1723 - 92), painter, 3rd s. of Rev. Samuel Reynolds of Plympton, Devon.; apprenticed to Thomas Hudson 1740 - 3; exh. SA 1760 - 8, RA 1769 - 90; PRA 1768 - 92; Kt. 1769; Principal Painter to the King 1784 - 92.
1750 - 2 [dep. Plymouth 11 May 1749; dep. Minorca 25 Jan. 1750] Leghorn, Rome (Jan. 1750 - 5 Apr. 1752), Florence, Bologna, Venice, Rome (by 5 Apr.), Velletri, Piperno, Sessa, Naples (Apr.), Rome ( - 3 May), Narni, Terni, Spoleto, Foligno, Assisi, Perugia, Arezzo, Florence (seven weeks), Bologna, Modena, Parma, Mantua, Ferrara, Venice (three weeks), Padua, Brescia, Bergamo, Milan, Turin [London 16 Oct.]
Ambitious, and with high ideals absorbed from Jonathan Richardson, the young Reynolds must have yearned for Italy, the mecca of any aspiring eighteenth-century artist; in fact, he owed his journey there to a chance encounter. In January 1749 Captain Augustus Keppel, en route for the Mediterranean, was obliged to put in to Plymouth for repairs; he stayed with his friend Lord Edgcumbe, who offered Reynolds a free passage south. Reynolds gratefully accepted, with the support of his two sisters, who lent him money. Reynolds's sojourn in Italy is recorded in ten surviving sketch-cum-notebooks, which contain hundreds of sketches, chiefly of paintings and sculpture, but also of buildings and scenery, together with copious notes about works of art, and some personal memoranda.1
Reynolds spent several months with Keppel in Minorca, painting portraits, before proceeding to Rome. Lodged in rooms in the former palace of the Queen of Sweden on the Trinita dei Monte, he wrote enthusiastically to Lord Edgcumbe, in one of the very few letters he seems to have written in Italy, 'I am now at the height of my wishes, in the midst of the greatest works of art the world has produced'. Later that year Reynolds ('Renelos') was living on the third floor of the English Coffee House in the Piazza di Spagna, where he was joined in 1751 by Patch. In 1752 Patch and Reynolds moved to the second floor of the Palazzo Zuccari, which had been converted into an inn catering especially for artists; later, possibly after his return from Naples ('Reynolds' was listed with a Mr Edgar at Capua on 1 April 1752),2 and before his departure for Florence, Reynolds is recorded in another part of the Palazzo.3 Reynolds certainly enjoyed the company of his compatriots in coffee-house society; he met prospective patrons there, like Sir William Lowther, and showed his satirical bent in a number of brilliant caricatures of Grand Tourists, executed in 1751.4 But he did not waste his time in frivolous pursuits, preferring 'to look more like a man of some Business and consequence no dangler nor Idler', and occupied most of his days with serious study, the purpose for which he had come.
Unlike many students of the period Reynolds regarded copying as 'a delusive kind of industry'. He lists only six, all done in the spring and early summer of 1750. Nor did he seek to make money by painting copies for grand tourists to take home (the copy he offered to paint as a present for Lord Edgcumbe has not survived, if it was ever executed). Portraits he seems equally to have avoided, though he painted Joseph Wilton in Florence and the future Mrs William Chambers in Paris. Reynolds's concern was rather to fill his sketch-books with the conceptions of the old masters, thus providing for his future use a store of valuable pictorial ideas: 'This figure will serve for a fame', he wrote under a sketch of a Pasinelli in Bologna, and, under another, 'Serve for Time Discovering Truth'. Occasionally he made studies of whole compositions in order to describe dispositions of light and shade; usually however his sketches were of figure arrangements and single figures; often he made colour notes. He also laid down some practical rules for himself based on the methods of the sixteenth-century Venetians, especially Tintoretto, as, for example, 'When the second Mass of light is too great interpose some dark figure to divide the two'.
Reynolds was overwhelmed by the Sistine Chapel which, on his first visit to the Vatican, he walked up and down for much of the day 'with great self-importance'. He later thought as he went in Florence from San Lorenzo to the Boboli Gardens, that it would be 'a difficult thing to determine' whether Michelangelo or Giovanni di Bologna was the greater sculptor. Although at first disappointed by Raphael's Stanze, he came to appreciate Raphael as the model of unaffected style, in contrast with whom he thought Michelangelo and Annibale Carracci were too wild, Domenichino too tame and Guido Reni too effeminate. Velazquez's Innocent X in the Palazzo Doria-Pamphilj he thought 'the finest portrait in the world'. Reynolds made no attempt to study or consort with the Italian artists of the day, such as Batoni. He did however know Zuccarelli, and presumably Nogari, since Richard Wilson had asked him to present his compliments to both artists on his arrival in Venice. Reynolds worried about the brevity of his stay in Florence, remembering his father's advice 'not to be in too great a hurry to show one self to the world but to lay in first as strong foundation as possible of knowledge & learning ... perhaps I shall ruin all and arrive at London without reputation and nobody that has ever heard of me when by staying here a month extraordinary my name will arrive before me'. Two months after leaving the city he was made a member of the Florentine Academy (3 September 1752). Reynolds brought back with him from Italy the fifteen-year-old Giuseppe Marchi, who was to be his pupil and remain his assistant most of his life. The collection of prints and drawings he had formed in Rome, which he left with his fellow-lodger, Simon Vierpyl, was shipped home by sea.
Reynolds's experiences in Italy provided the foundation of his later style; as Sir David Wilkie later remarked, 'Would Reynolds have done what he did, if he had never seen Italy?'
1. These volumes are BMPL (2), Soane Museum, London (2), MMA (1), the Fogg Art Museum, Camb., Mass. (1), and priv. colls.(4). See W. Cotton, Sir Joshua Reynolds' Notes and Observations on Pictures, [1859]. G. Perini, Storia
dell'Arte, 73[1991]:361 - 412. 2. ASN cra 1257. 3. AVR sa, S.Andrea delle Fratte. 4. See Cotton (at n1), 8 - 9. O'Connor 1983, 5 - 22.
J. H.