We owe an apology to the new President whom we left standing upon the threshold of the Royal Academy, which opened its doors with a first exhibition of one hundred and thirty-six pictures! The memory of this commendable modesty should not be allowed to fade in these days when canvas stretches by the acre over the long-suffering walls of Burlington House, when artists appear not singly but in battalions and the cry is “still they come.” In April 1769 Reynolds received the honour of knighthood and this seems to have put the finishing touches to his social claims. Henceforward he painted fewer portraits; the records of 1771 credit him with a mere seventy, and though this figure may make modern men gasp, it compares but feebly with the one hundred and eighty-four that stood to the credit of an earlier year. The President increased the number of his clubs, enlarged his dining circle, became more and more dignified, mellow, gracious, and urbane, farther removed than before from the turmoil that was going on in art circles of the less successful men around him. Having all the cream he required, he was not concerned with quarrels about skimmed milk. Some of his biographers think that Romney was beginning to compete with the master, and that this competition accounts for the diminishing number of his sitters, but it is reasonable to suppose that a man who can make his own prices and is beyond the reach of want may regard seventy portraits as a very satisfactory output for one year, when he has other duties to fulfil and is by temperament a lover of the world’s good things. Fortune could have given him nothing more, unless the hearing that passed in the old days of the pilgrimage to Rome had been restored, and if such a miracle could have been vouchsafed, the painter’s splendid indifference to matters that annoy quick, nervous temperaments might have passed, and the latter days might have been clouded. If wisdom at one entrance was nearly shut out, there was plenty left, as may be gathered from a study of the Discourses. Their vitality is proved by the fact that new editions are still called for, and many members of the more modern schools of painting declare that Reynolds saw some aspects of painting with twentieth-century eyes.

In 1773 Plympton remembered its famous artist and elected him mayor, an honour that touched him nearly. One cannot help thinking that it was more to him even than the degree of Doctor of Civil Law, conferred in the same year by Oxford University de honoris causa, though this too helped him to paint his own portrait in flamboyant style, and the artist loved colour. One portrait of himself was sent to the town of Plympton and hung between two pictures that were “old masters” according to the leading lights of the Corporation. In truth, they were two of Sir Joshua’s own early works, and from this simple story we may learn that artists come and artists go, but the mental calibre of corporations is constant and not subject to change. He sent another picture of himself to the Uffizzi Gallery in Florence, where so many Masters stand self-committed to canvas in pictures that do not err upon the side of making the sitters lack distinction.

The next eight years were uneventful, save for the fact that the President was doing some of his best work and enjoying life in the fullest and most complete fashion imaginable. Nearly all who knew him loved him, and to the great majority of men and women he was just and kind. For a man so completely free from emotion and self-revelation, Reynolds claimed a very large circle of intimates, and it was hardly an age of introspection. Men confessed themselves to their Maker but not to their friends; the formalities of life and speech presented an effective barrier to the emotions, even the stage was as artificial and pompous as it could be. One may perhaps acknowledge an uneasy feeling that David Garrick himself would make a very small impression upon a latter-day audience, if he confronted it with the mid-eighteenth-century style of speech and action.

In 1780 the Academy Exhibition was transferred from Pall Mall to Somerset House, where it was destined to remain until 1838, the year of its removal to the National Gallery, where it stayed thirty-one years on the way to Burlington House. Among the portraits painted by the President in that year was one of General Oglethorpe, who, according to the “Table Talk” of Samuel Rogers (quoted by Sir Walter Armstrong), could tell of the days when he had shot snipe in Conduit Street. In the following year Reynolds painted the wonderful picture of the Ladies Horatia, Laura, and Maria Waldegrave, one of the few groups whose arrangement is beyond cavil. Few will look in vain to that picture for any of the finest qualities of Sir Joshua’s art. He had very little to learn, though in the summer and autumn of 1781 he visited the Low Countries, staying in Bruges, Brussels, The Hague, Amsterdam, and other cities, and showing himself strangely indifferent to the pictures of Franz Hals, though these might have been presumed to appeal to any portrait painter. His records and impressions of the journey were set down most carefully, and are preserved; they show that success had not impaired discernment, and that the painter was responsive to most of the thoughts that stir educated visitors to the Dutch galleries to-day.

In 1782, the year in which Romney painted his first picture of Mistress Hart, afterwards Lady Emma Hamilton, Reynolds sat to his great rival Gainsborough, now at the height of his fame and in the last years of his life; the two men disliked each other, and the picture was never completed. Some say that Reynolds made a hasty remark about his fixed determination not to paint Gainsborough’s portrait in return, and some mischief-maker carried the words to Gainsborough. Others think that the touch of palsy or slight attack of paralysis that came to Sir Joshua about the time of the sitting, brought it to a close. There must be more than this underlying the true story of the affair, for though a visit to Brighton and to Bath restored the President’s health, the sittings were not resumed, even when Reynolds wrote to say he was ready to sit again. In 1783 Sir Joshua sent ten portraits to the Academy, while Gainsborough, exhibiting there for the last time, sent twenty-five pictures, including the famous panels of George III., and his children, now in Windsor. But Reynolds added to his fame in this year, for he painted the portrait of Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse. Then he paid another visit to the Low Countries, to find with regret that Rubens’ appeal was failing.

In the following year, 1784, Sir Joshua sent sixteen pictures to the Academy, including the famous Mrs. Siddons, Charles James Fox, and Mrs. Abingdon as Roxalana. Gainsborough had quarrelled with the R.A. and exhibited no more, though he lived until 1788. With December, Dr. Johnson’s strenuous and useful life came to an end; he passed away exhorting his old friend never to paint on Sunday, and to read the Bible. Reynolds has left a very interesting study of the Doctor’s character. In the following year, the President went for the third time to the Low Countries, and bought a number of pictures; he also received the honour of a commission from Catherine, Empress of Russia, and painted the beautiful picture of the Duchess of Devonshire and her baby that hangs at Chatsworth to-day. Walpole said, “it is little like, and not good,” but posterity has declined to accept the verdict. Sir Walter Armstrong considers that it ranks with the “Lady Crosbie” and “Nelly O’Brien” as the “most entirely successful creations” of the artist. In ’87 the President sent thirteen pictures to the Academy, including the “Angel’s Heads” now in the National Gallery. They are studies of Frances Isabella Gordon, daughter of Lord William Gordon, and the picture was given to the Gallery in 1841. A year later, London saw the picture that the Empress Catherine had commissioned, the subject is “The Infant Hercules” and the canvas hangs in the Hermitage Gallery at St. Petersburg. It is one of the artist’s failures, and he received fifteen hundred guineas for it. This is the date of the famous Marlborough family group that is to be seen at Blenheim.

A year later, when the President sent some dozen pictures to the R.A., his activity came to a sudden end. Some forty years and more had passed since he painted the first of his works that concerns us, and he had not known an idle season. His record would have brought honour to any three men; he had lived as a philosopher should, grateful for the gifts of the gods, and not abusing any. Suddenly, in mid-July of 1789, about the time of the fall of the Bastille, one eye failed him as he worked at his easel; he laid his brush aside. “All things have an end—I have come to mine,” he remarked, with the quiet courage that never deserted him, and he spent what remained to him of life making gradual preparation for the last day, sustained by memories of the past through hours that were not always free from pain and distress. Save for a quarrel with the Academy, arising out of the contest for membership between Bonomi and Fuseli, there was nothing to disturb the closing years of the old painter’s public life, and even in this quarrel, he was the victor. The General Assembly apologised, and Reynolds withdrew his resignation, though Chambers, now Sir William, was obliged to act for him at Somerset House. In December of 1790 Reynolds delivered his final address to the students, the name of Michelangelo being last upon his lips. Little more than a year before he died, the President sat to the Swedish artist von Breda, for a picture now in the Stockholm Academy. West did his presidential work for him in the last months of his life.

Many friends testify to the tranquillity of these last days, though failing sight and the deprivation of the liberal diet to which he was accustomed had lowered the spirits that were once bright as well as serene. Perhaps modern medical science would have availed to lengthen his life, and make the last few years more worth living; but in the eighteenth century one needed a very sturdy constitution to endure the combined attack of a disease and a doctor. Sir Joshua was in his sixty-ninth year—he had lived in the fullest sense all the time—and when one evening in February 1792 Death came to the House in Leicester Square, his visit was quite expected, and was met with a tranquil mind. The body lay in state awhile in the Royal Academy, and was then taken to St. Paul’s Cathedral, and laid by the side of Sir Christopher Wren. To-day we look at the artist’s work with a critical eye—he can no longer thrive by comparison with contemporaries, but must compete with all dead masters of portraiture; and it will be admitted on every side that he holds his own, that before every throne of judgment his best works will plead for him and vindicate the admiration of his countrymen.

It is not the least of his claims to high consideration that his art moved steadily forward, that the last work was the best.

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