Joshua Reynolds history

Joshua Reynolds history (1723-92) an English painter whose art satisfied the elegant society of eighteenth century England-Sir Joshua Reynolds.

Unlike Hogarth, Reynolds had been to Italy and had come to agree with the connoisseurs of his time that the great masters of the Italian renaissance - Raphael, Michelangelo, Correggio - were the unrivalled exemplars of true art. In 1749 Reynolds sailed for Italy as the guest of Commodore Augustus Keppel. In Rome, Reynolds studied the Old Masters with a single-mindedness unmatched by any earlier English painter. His only diversion was a small number of caricature paintings in the manner of his fellow Devonian Thomas Patch. Raphael was Reynolds's hero, but on his way back to England he visited northern Italy and came under the spell of the Venetian painters and Correggio.

Reynolds's main types of portraiture commemorate naval and military heroes, civil and ecclesiastical dignitaries, the English landowning oligarchy in both its public and private aspects, actors and actresses, and children in fanciful roles, related in their vein of sentiment to "fancy pictures" like the Age of Innocence (1788). His most ambitious translation of a subject picture into a portrait is the group of the daughters of Sir William Montgomery, the Graces Adorning a Term of Hymen (1774), a Miltonian bridal masque in which the rite of worship to the God of Wedlock is performed by three famous beauties, one recently married, another preparing for marriage, and the third still to be betrothed. Among the finest of his heroicized military portraits in a battle setting are Colonel Banastre Tarleton (1782) and George Augustus Eliott, Lord Heathfield (1788).

Reynolds exhibited regularly at the Society of Artists, and he was named the first president of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1768. As his eminence grew, he was knighted in 1769, and in 1784 he was appointed principal royal portrait painter. Sir Joshua Reynolds died on February 23, 1792, and was buried in St. Paul's Cathedral.

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