It’s the 300th birthday of Sir Joshua Reynolds on Sunday (July 16) and at Kenwood House, they’re celebrating by bringing together the 17 pictures of his that the museum owns. A dozen are in one room; five in another, set alongside his rivals and contemporaries, Gainsborough and Romney.
It’s a splendid opportunity to see the span of the work of the man who dominated the artistic life of England in his age. He was revered by contemporaries: John Constable wrote that his paintings conveyed “certainly the finest feeling of art that ever existed”. Only the contrarian William Blake took the opposite view, followed by the Pre-Raphaelites, who called him Sloshua. Rude.
