There are certain men born to every generation who approach life with the complete assurance of distinction in any work that they may have chosen for the exercise of their gifts. They are strangers to doubt and uncertainty; they disarm Fortune by claiming freely as a right what she is accustomed to grant grudgingly as a favour—"they ride Life’s lists as a knight might ride.” One feels that these fortunate few are destined for success just as the majority are doomed to failure, that nothing save a long series of mishaps can keep them from the goal of their ambition. They have the temperament that makes achievement easy, and a steadfast determination that the demons of mischance cannot resist for long.

When one turns to consider English art in the eighteenth century, the name of Joshua Reynolds stands out in a brighter light than any other. One would not say that he was the greatest painter of his time—Gainsborough’s gifts exceeded his in many directions, and Romney enters into competition too—but Reynolds was born under a fortunate star, and Nature gave him as a birthday present a rare mixture of talent, industry, and common-sense, together with a sober judgment that could not be turned aside by passion or emotion. Such gifts, if they do not always create a genius, may enable their possessor to achieve work that has certain affinities with the masterpieces of the immortals. Nobody in these days would deny for a moment that Reynolds possessed qualifications of the highest order; but ours is an age of hero-worship, and we are rather inclined to go beyond our brief in dealing with a representative man whose work has survived the criticism (though, alas, it has not always survived the atmosphere) of nearly two centuries. Reynolds is not the less a great painter because he did not happen to be the great man so many of his biographers have seen, nor was he a heaven-sent genius of the kind that flutters the musical dovecots from time to time. Infant prodigies are hardly known in the world of art, and Reynolds started life as a clever young man determined to make a name. He became soon a painter strong enough to realise his own limitations and those of his age, and to take the best possible steps to secure for his own art, and incidentally for that of his country, the highest position in the esteem of the world at large. Had there been no Reynolds there might have been no Royal Academy—the Institution in its earliest days was indebted very deeply to him. Himself far above the squabbles of the hour, he raised the Royal Academy into the serene and almost untroubled atmosphere in which he lived his life.

“I will be a painter, if you will give me the chance of being a good one,” he is said to have remarked when quite a lad, and this is but one of the simple sentences that hold and in a sense reveal the keynote of his character. Reynolds was determined to succeed. When he started his work there were few people in England who could guide him in the right way, and consequently we must not look for any great achievement in the early portraits. The painter may be said to have owed his first success to Commodore Keppel, who took him on a cruise in the Mediterranean and helped him to come into touch with the great masterpieces that will probably stimulate artists for all time. In return, the painter gave the sailor a measure of fame that his naval achievements would hardly have secured.

Italy turned the dross of Reynolds’ art to fine gold, and he never shrank from acknowledging the debt. Had he stayed in England he might have been a greater man than all his contemporaries, save Gainsborough and Romney, but he could not have given the world any one of the pictures that are reproduced here. Art will not yield to inspiration alone. The musician, or the literary man, with very simple education may be able to achieve wonders, but the artist who looks to brushes and colours for his medium must sacrifice diligently for many years at the shrine of technique before his hand can express what is in his brain. The years between 1749 and 1752, devoted by Reynolds to studying and copying the Vatican frescoes and the pictures of Padua, Milan, Turin, and Paris, were invaluable. Indeed he was one of the greatest copyists of his time, and Sir Walter Armstrong thinks that one of his copies of a Rembrandt is classed among the originals in the National Gallery to-day!

Down to the year of the Italian journey the young painter’s life had been quite uneventful. Born in 1723 at Plympton in Devonshire, where his father was a school-master, he was apprenticed in London to Thomas Hudson, a portrait painter of the day and a Devon man too. Hudson gave his pupil Guercino’s drawings to copy. Before the time of apprenticeship had expired Reynolds had quarrelled with his master and gone back to Devonshire, where he painted work that was of no great importance, under the patronage of the first Lord Edgcumbe. At his house Reynolds met the Commodore Keppel, whose kindness enabled him to see Italy, and it was the sojourn in that real home of art that brought Reynolds back to England a portrait painter of the first class.

Michelangelo had impressed him deeply. In later days he never lost an opportunity of advising students to sit at the feet of the great master, and the influence of the work in the Sistine Chapel may be noted in the famous picture of Mrs. Siddons, now to be seen in the Dulwich Gallery. Ludovico Caracci and Guido had given him hints that were of infinite value in the moulding of his technique; for colour he had gone to Titian, Tintoretto, and Rubens, of whom the last named was beginning to lose his appeal in the last years of Reynolds’ life. Sir Joshua had a supreme facility for taking from every artist the best that was in him, melting it in the crucible of his own thought, and applying the product to his pictures. There is no doubt that the sixteenth-century Venetians impressed Reynolds as much as they impressed Ruskin at a later date, but in the middle of the eighteenth century the school of Bologna was in the ascendant in England, and it is through Reynolds’ actions rather than his words that we see how Venice had influenced him. Sir Walter Armstrong thinks that Reynolds lived well rather than wisely in Italy, and that when he came back to town his wild oats were all sown, but it is hard to find any justification for the belief that Reynolds was at any time of his life a free liver. The pleasures of the table may have claimed him when he reached middle age; indeed, Dr. Johnson said to him on one occasion, “You complain about the tea I drink, but I do not count the glasses you empty,” or words to that effect. As far as other forms of dissipation go, there is no evidence that Reynolds was ever a victim to them. He was always perfect master of his self-control, and when the years had toned down certain faults of thought and manner, he became mellowed, like old wine, and not less stimulating.

Students of the famous discourses that Sir Joshua addressed annually to the Royal Academy after he became first President of the new institution, may be justified if they suspect that the great painter adopted the same rule in dealing with his students that skilled musical composers use when dealing with their pupils. A musican knows that the laws of harmony and counterpoint are not fixed, that the musical horizon widens year by year, and that rules may often be disregarded by a composer who has something to say; but, in order that composition may grow from some definite form, it is necessary that the rules should be mastered before they are disregarded. So in dealing with things of art, Reynolds said much to his audience that his own practice did not bear out. He would not hint at his own preferences quite so frankly as his canvases did and it is not at all unlikely that he realised as well as we do, that while students, like the poor, are always with us, great artists are few and far between, and will survive all academic limitations.

When Reynolds came back to England in 1752, he went down to Devonshire to recruit his health. While his sojourn abroad had been productive of so much that had been invaluable to him, he had met with two unfortunate accidents. In Minorca he had fallen from his horse and sustained injuries that had left his face scarred for all time. In the Vatican he had sustained a chill that brought about the deafness destined to be a life-long infirmity. So he took holiday in the county he loved so well, and after his return he opened a studio in St. Martin’s Street, acting on the advice of his friend and patron, Lord Edgcumbe. There was no period of weary waiting. Thanks to the quality of his work and the patronage granted so freely, he began at once to enjoy the success that belongs to the popular portrait painter. A little later he moved to Great Newport Street, where the accommodation was better suited to the growing claims of sitters, and in 1760 he went to 47 Leicester Square, now an auction-house, where he lived for the remainder of his life. As he moved he raised his prices, but nobody seemed to mind. Everybody who was anybody, paid cheerfully. So did some of the other people.

Many artists remain painters all their lives. Meet them in a studio or at a private view and they are illuminating; talk about another lying outside their immediate interests and they are dumb, or worse, for some talk without saying anything, as though they were mere politicians. Perhaps we have no right to complain of this lack of mental dimensions, but it is permissible to note with pleasure the few cases in which an artist reveals himself as an accomplished man of the world. Reynolds would never have been content to be nothing more than a painter, and he chose his friends so wisely that the living served him as well as the dead. If the great artists of Italy had shed light upon his path in one direction, what did he not owe to the men of his own generation, whose society must have been a source of inspiration to any intelligent man? Dr. Johnson himself could only have been inspiring company, even though we may think in our heart of hearts that the benefit of the inspiration was not without serious drawbacks. Reynolds enjoyed also the intimate friendship of Garrick, Goldsmith, Gibbon, and Burke, he consorted with many other men who made some mark in the world of thought, and in this atmosphere the extraordinary receptivity of his mind must have served him to great advantage. He had human weaknesses to live down, and it is to his credit that he conquered all or most of them. Like so many honest Englishmen, there was a touch of the snob about him—witness his correspondence with Lord Edgcumbe during the first visit to the Continent. He was not without jealousy, as may be seen from his pettish condemnation of the work of Liotard, the miniature painter and pastellist, and his references to Gainsborough and Romney, whose success and accomplishments galled him not a little. He was vulgar, until he learned refinement from the distinguished people with whom he was brought into contact—witness the gilded coach and gaudy liveries he bought when he established himself in Leicester Square, the coach in which his unfortunate sister Frances was compelled to drive in order that the man in the street might stare open-mouthed and talk about her brother. There is hardly a “Lion Comique,” or a lady of the music halls drawing prime minister’s salary for songs blatant or obscene, who would commit such an offence to-day, and against these lapses from taste Sir Joshua’s acquaintance with the best minds of his day failed to save him. Perhaps the atmosphere of Leicester Square in the eighteenth, as in the twentieth, century was a little theatrical. Of course the faults of a man and the merits of his work are distinct and stand apart from one another, but we are too apt to look at Reynolds the man in the light of Goldsmith’s epitaph, and it is the failing of popular biography to supply popular people with a measure of moral equipment that would make a saint self-conscious. It is far more interesting to see great men as they lived, and understand that, like the rest of us, they had a fair, or unfair, share of faults. Had Sir Joshua possessed twice as many failings, he would still remain one of the greatest, if not the greatest, of British portrait painters. Had he associated all the virtues with less achievement, he could not have interested us, because happily we do not judge art by the moral standard of the artist.

Perhaps the most remarkable side of Reynolds’ mind was seen in its response to the real truths that underlie all the arts. He held his work to be a mode of expressing human experience, he knew that there was a domain lying beyond the reach of rules, and bade his students look “with dilated eye,” sacrificing detail to general effect for the sake of the best and most imaginative work. He declared without any reservations, that he had found art in England in the lowest possible state, he compared some of his contemporaries’ work with sign-post painting, but his fine courage was only stimulated by the bad conditions that prevailed. He sought to raise them, and as a portrait painter, made it his business to discover the perfections of his sitters, with the result, that, as his genius was wholly interpretative, his pictures stand rather less for his sitters than for their time.

A weak man might have succumbed to the temptations that beset Reynolds when he had established himself in Leicester Square. He was in a sense the darling of society, earning a larger income than had been gained by any of his contemporaries, although he painted for prices that a third-rate man could gain to-day, if we do not regard the changed value of money. But Reynolds never succumbed to society; he conquered it, showing himself worthy of all the success that came to him. He did his best, he worked hard, relaxing his efforts only when his position was unassailable, took his enjoyment temperately, if we consider the age in which he lived, and never forgot that his chief aim and object in life was to paint portraits, and to paint them as well as he could. There were years in which he completed from three to four portraits every week, but by the time he was President of the Royal Academy, the output had fallen to sixty or seventy a year, no small achievement for a man who was at liberty to enjoy all that was best, and brightest, and most enduring in London society, and everything most attractive in the country.

The life and times of Sir Joshua have a special interest for British artists, even apart from his work, because he lived through the years of storm and strife that saw the development of the R.A. It is not easy to tell in full the story of its establishment without long and detailed references to the quarrels and intrigues of the artists of the day and even then it is not easy to see the truth clearly through the mists of controversy. None of Sir Joshua’s biographies goes uncontradicted, and it is safe to say that we must be content to forego for all time exact knowledge of certain incidents in the life of Reynolds. He had considerable reserve, a fair sense of diplomacy, and was not without knowledge that there were foes as well as friends in the crowd that surrounded him. His contemporaries were often baffled by his silence, and the secrets of his tastes and intimate likes and dislikes died with him. He had friends, but no confidantes. A brief outline of the creation of the R.A. is all that needs be given here.

In the year 1760, when Reynolds was approaching the zenith of his fame, an art exhibition was held in London, attracted a great deal of attention, and became an annual institution. Thereafter, we begin to hear of the Society of Artists, which received from George III. a certificate of Incorporation in 1765, blossomed out with the grandiloquent title of the “Incorporated Society of Artists of Great Britain,” and published a list of two hundred and eleven members, including Joshua Reynolds. An offshoot from this society was known as the Free Society of Artists; in the history of art there have always been some men “agin the government.” Heart-burning and jealousy were associated with the work of the Incorporated Society, and William Chambers the architect, who had the king’s ear, brought about the foundation of the R.A. Reynolds took no visible part in the intrigue, in fact he was abroad during the months when the squabbles were most violent, and when the Presidency was offered to him, he asked for time to discuss the matter with Dr. Johnson and Edmund Burke. Apparently he had studied Shakspere’s “Julius CÆsar.” In December 1768, the constitution of the Royal Academy was signed by the King, and the Incorporated Society was left to linger for a few years in the cold shades of opposition and then depart from a world that had no further use for it. William Chambers and Benjamin West seem to have done all that was necessary to bring King George on to the side of the new venture, which had a very wide constitution, and thirty-six original members, including two ladies, Angelica Kaufmann and Mary Moser. William Chambers became Treasurer, Dalton was appointed Antiquary, Goldsmith was Professor of Ancient History, and Dr. Johnson stood for Ancient Literature. Curiously enough, it was the foundation by Captain Coram of the Foundling Hospital that led indirectly to the creation of the Royal Academy. Hogarth, who was a great friend of Coram, gave pictures for the gallery in the Hospital, Reynolds’ old master, Hudson, Reynolds himself, and Wilson, a contemporary painter of great achievement, did the same. Mr. Claude Phillips, whose life of Sir Joshua Reynolds is one of the best written and most discerning tributes to the master extant, thinks that the success of the gallery at the Foundlings led to the opening of the first exhibition of pictures by living masters in 1860. The Society of Arts was then six years old, and the Society of Artists was established in friendly rivalry. We have remarked that at the time when the Incorporated Society of Artists was engaged in the final quarrel that led to the foundation of the Academy, Sir Joshua was travelling abroad with Richard Burke. His absence from the scene of strife is more likely to have been diplomatic than unintentional.