The Artistic Development of Reynolds and Gainsborough Two Essays Classic Reprint

Excerpt from The Artistic Development of Reynolds and Gainsborough: Two Essays

T is, perhaps, no matter for surprise that an artist who painted the portraits of Johnson, Goldsmith, Gibbon, Burke, Sheridan, Garrick, Mrs. Siddons, and the great statesmen and leaders of society of both sexes, in a day when Horace Walpole was immortalising them all with his satirical pen, and Boswell was watching their behaviour and noting down their words - it is small matter for surprise that a painter so circumstanced should be remembered, rather on account of the subjects, than the manner of his work. In a general way, indeed, the public has always liked Sir joshua's pictures; it has delighted in his name children, worshipped his courtly ladies, and enjoyed his mellow colouring and the rich bloom of texture which he dusted over all. The public has enjoyed all these things in its own way; but, so far, when it has deputed an author to write about Reynolds, he has been charged to hunt among the letters and memoirs Bhis visitors' visitors and their friends. It is well enough, indeed, that a society s@ld be accurately depicted and brought down to us; but that has once for all been done by Walpole and Boswell, and in these days no Life of Reynolds constructed on the lines of the Life of jolmson can be anything but a weak and blurred reflection of an incomparable original. By all 'means let us use Reynolds's portraits to illustrate the letters and memoirs of his day; by all means, too, let us find out what manner of man the painter himself was, and in what manner of company he moved, and what they thought of him: but let us bear in mind that, when we have done all this, we have only prepared the way for what with the greatest. English painter is the matter of highest importance - the consideration of him as an arfz'sz'.

N ow as an artist Reynolds has never yet been studied no written life of him contains even an attempt to trace the origin and development of his style. What were his powers and their limitations? What is his relative greatness when measured against the greatness of the greatest? How does he stand in the company of the Holbeins and Dilrers.

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