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.
At Kenwood we get Reynolds as selected by its owner, Lord Iveigh, a discerning collector who knew what he liked, and what he liked were beautiful women and children. So, what you don’t get are Reynolds’ male portraits – except for a copy of his portrait of Lord Mansfield, first owner of Kenwood.
What you do get, unexpectedly, is one of his so-called ’fancy pictures’, which sends up portraiture. The Infant Academy depicts adorably winsome toddlers practising the art for which Reynolds is best known. The baby girl model is wearing a huge fancy hat; opposite a boy infant artist, against a classical backdrop, paints her likeness. Rolled ignominiously on the ground underneath the boy is a classical bust. It mocks the portrait painters of the Royal Academy, and sends up Reynolds himself.
The ladies are mostly aristocratic, sometimes dignified with classical or literary references, Reynolds’ favourite device. So, there’s a charming picture of Mrs Musters as Hebe, feeding Jupiter the eagle, all windswept, with short dry brushstrokes conveying movement and lightness in her fluttering drapery.
Nearby is another classical reference: the celebrated courtesan Kitty Fisher (who reputedly ate a hundred pound note off a slice of bread and butter) is here as Cleopatra, dropping a pearl into a goblet to dissolve it in vinegar. This paper’s Brian Sewell called Reynolds a monstrous toady, but this shows his humorous side. Reynolds is the despair of conservators for his rash experimental approach to pigment; here he used carmine or red lake for her cheeks, which hasn’t worn well.
Not all the sitters are mythologised. The portrait of Catherine Moore is a straight depiction of a young woman in a blue hat, but the way it overshadows her face gives her an enigmatic aspect.
The child portraits are lovely; take Master Philip Yorke, a three-year-old with a head of red curls holding himself still so as not to disturb the robin on his arm. It could be toe-curling, but it would take a curmudgeon not to be charmed. The irregular dark surface in the corner is another casualty of Reynolds’ disastrous experimentation, this time with pine resin varnish. What we see now isn’t what people saw then.
The man in the room is Reynolds himself, old and bespectacled. But there’s something of Rembrandt about the honesty of it. There’s no higher praise.
