We have now come down to the year 1769, and may pause with advantage to recall some of Sir Joshua’s achievements and experiences that have been omitted from a rather hurried survey. He has already painted many of the most famous men and women of his time, and his contributions to the exhibitions of the Society of Artists have been the admiration of all who take an interest in pictures. Here some of his most famous pictures have been hung, the “Lady Elizabeth Keppel as a bridesmaid,” the “Countess Waldegrave,” “Garrick between Tragedy and Comedy” (now in Lord Rothschild’s town house) and many others too numerous to be mentioned in such a brief review as this.

He has made another pleasant journey into Devonshire, this time in company with Dr. Johnson, whose consumption of cider and cream has created a mild sensation. He has visited Wilton and Longford, where some of his works may be seen to-day; he has enlarged his circle of friends, while his acquaintances are as the sands upon the seashore for multitude. He belongs to the once famous Dilettanti Society, founded in 1732 to study antiquities and arts; he has painted his own portrait to celebrate his election, and presented it to the Society. It may be seen in the Grafton Gallery to-day, together with two groups of members painted at a later date.

His drawing has become strong, his modelling firm, and his colour has many of the qualities that distinguished the Venetian masters he loved so well, but, alas, he has not learned the secrets of permanent colouring, and some of his most brilliant glazes are beginning to fade before the eyes of the troubled owners of the pictures. He has surrendered to the pseudo-classicism of his age, and some of his compositions are absurdly indebted to mythology; but the fault was a virtue then, and while we complain it is only right to refer the grievance to the time rather than to the man, and a study of Boswell explains the painter’s attitude, even though it cannot justify it.

He has found time to enjoy the pursuits of a country gentleman; he shoots and hunts in the best sporting circles. His home in Leicester Square is open to all sorts and conditions of men; the leading lights of the day—Gainsborough and Romney excepted—are welcome. He keeps a liberal but ill-served table, and his friends will find a welcome if they call in time for dinner at five o’clock, even if they must scramble for a fair share of the meal. He has lost the raw manners of early years, faux pas are few and far between. From Johnson he has acquired a certain literary style, rather heavy and turgid, perhaps, but precise and final. It is possible, but not certain, that “The Club” has been established, and that the twelve original members are meeting for supper at the sign of the Turk’s Head in Gerrard Street. He has pupils, for whom he does little or nothing, and assistants who paint draperies for him, and receive a little useful instruction now and again. Northcote, who is to publish his “Memoirs of Sir Joshua Reynolds” nearly half a century later, and become the one successful painter from the Leicester Square establishment, has met the great man in Devonshire with emotions similar to those that Reynolds felt in the far away days when, an unknown pupil of Hudson, he saw the great and distinguished author of “The Rape of the Lock” in the centre of an admiring and respectful crowd.

Who shall do justice to the crowds that thronged the studio? Certainly mere words cannot picture the scenes that the old house in Leicester Square witnessed in those stirring times. Deafness could hardly have been an unmixed evil to a man whose sitters were of the most diverse kind. Leslie and Taylor in their voluminous work, “The Life and Times of Sir Joshua Reynolds,” have written at length upon this aspect of the painter’s daily life, and have described the constant stream of men and women who could not have been placed side by side for five minutes save on the walls of the exhibition. Representatives of the most opposed school of politics, High Church dignitaries, courtesans, soldiers, flaneurs, society women, sailors, ambassadors, actors, children, members of the Royal Family, men from the street, like White the paviour—one and all claimed the measure of immortality that his brush confers, and if his best work could but have retained its qualities, the latter half of the eighteenth century would be preserved for us in fashion calculated to make future generations envious. Unfortunately, Sir Walter Armstrong, the painter’s most trenchant latter day critic, is justified when he writes: “Speaking roughly, Sir Joshua’s early pictures darken, the works of his middle period fade, those of his late maturity crack. The productions of his first youth and of his old age stand best of all.” When the worst has been said, it is a glorious heritage that the painter left to his country, but who can avoid regrets when thinking what it might have been if Reynolds had mastered the secrets of permanent colour, if the carmine and lake had endured, and the more brilliant effects had not been so largely experimental—if he had given them a fair trial in studies before he used them for his best work? Perhaps his success left no time for experiments. Sitters were urgent and could not wait while the painter studied the question of the chemistry of pigments.

There is a curiously sane and optimistic note about all the Reynolds portraits. Even where he does not succeed—in painting portrait groups, for example—the fault is merely one of composition, he keeps to his earliest intention of expressing what is best in the sitter, and seeing him “with dilated eye"; he is merely unable to set several figures upon the same canvas. Save for ever increasing deafness and a little trouble with sister Frances, who keeps house for him and is not cast in the same placid mould, nothing occurs to disturb the even tenor of his happy life. Intellect rules emotions—either he has no feeling for intrigue or he can keep his emotions beyond the reach of prying eyes. Even his relations with Angelica Kaufmann, now in her twenty-eighth year, and an original member of the Royal Academy, baffle the censors who would fain discover that she was the painter’s mistress. “His heart has grown callous by contact with women,” says one of his contemporaries or biographers, and this may well be so. Angelica Kaufmann was one of the women who attract men, and there is no evidence to show that Reynolds was more than a good friend to her. Long years later, when the visits to Leicester Square could have been no more than a memory, she attracted Goethe, who used to read to her some of his unpublished work. The painter’s self-control has made some of his biographers angry; they write as though fearful lest, on account of his virtue, there shall be no more cakes and ale, and ginger shall no longer be hot in the mouth. If they could but catch him tripping, he might return to the highest place in their affections, and all would be forgiven. There is something so human in this attitude that it becomes almost tolerable, though it is hard to avoid a smile when one finds that the subject of the relations between Sir Joshua and Miss Kaufmann have been discussed quite seriously by foreign writers. If Sir Joshua could have made the lady a better artist, if it can be shown that he saved her from being a worse one than she was, there is something to write about; the subject of their personal relations cannot possibly concern the world at large, and is not worth a tithe of the ink that has been spilt in attack or defence.

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