Miner examines 18th-century poet-artist William Blake's word-play Los as furor poeticus which paraphrases Joshua Reynolds' Discourses on Art (annotated by Blake), a work that records 'The Sublime in ...Painting, as in Poetry, is so overpowering' that there is no room for the 'little elegancies of art.' Although Blake construes a farrago of allusions in demeaning Reynolds, one of Blake's most memorable phrases comes from Reynolds' Discourses on Art.
This article argues that Sir Joshua Reynolds's martial portraiture from the closing year of the American War of Independence constitutes not only a complex diagnostic of cultural humiliation and ...social decay, but also an intrepid attempt to clear the ground for the emergence of representational paradigms suitable to the post- American era. American decolonization forced Britain to reassess and realign many of its conceptions of self. In Reynolds's work of the late 1770s and early 1780s, we can begin to understand what it means to be post-American. As we will see, the failure of Britain's martial efficacy not only forced Reynolds to engage with his own earlier paintings of heroic masculinity, but also allowed him to develop a critical idiom that would define his late style. By reckoning with his own and his nation's past, Reynolds found himself inventing futures that might put the American crisis in abeyance.
A portrait of empire through the biographies of a Native American, a Pacific Islander, and the British artist who painted them both Three interconnected eighteenth-century lives offer a fresh account ...of the British Empire and its intrusion into Indigenous societies. This engaging history brings together the stories of Joshua Reynolds and two Indigenous men, the Cherokee Ostenaco and the Raiatean Mai. Fullagar uncovers the life of Ostenaco, tracing his emergence as a warrior, his engagement with colonists through war and peace, and his eventual rejection of imperial politics during the American Revolution. She delves into the story of Mai, his confrontation with conquest and displacement, his voyage to London on Cook's imperial expedition, and his return home with a burning ambition to right past wrongs. Woven throughout is a new history of Reynolds, growing up in Devon near a key port in England, becoming a portraitist of empire, rising to the top of Britain's art world and yet remaining ambivalent about his nation's expansionist trajectory.
James Northcote has remained in history less as a painter than as one of Reynolds's first biographers. This article intends to show how in the Memoirs of Sir Joshua Reynolds Northcote drew from three ...distinct biographical subgenres to confer on Reynolds a heroic status as founder of the English school of painting. He revived some topoi used in the first "lives" of artists written in the Renaissance, thus inserting his subject in art history. He also borrowed the strategies of the ''intimate biography'' developed by his contemporaries to achieve an effect of proximity with the heroic figure. Finally, the Memoirs shared with other biographical works of the period the task of assessing the progress of the art of painting in the country, with a particular emphasis on the role of a single man, Reynolds. PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
This article offers a fresh reading of Sir Joshua Reynolds's celebrated portrait of the Marlborough Family (1777–79), in which the painting is interpreted in relation to the themes of dynasty, ...connoisseurship, parental tenderness, childhood and intimacy, and as an ambitious assemblage of interacting pictorial elements. The article is designed to suggest new, historically informed ways of approaching and interpreting Reynolds's own work, and hopes to indicate the interpretive richness of the Georgian family portrait as a pictorial genre. It also makes a case for the benefits that continue to accrue from the practice and skill of looking in a concentrated, questioning and patient way at a single work of art.
Miner discusses Sir Joshua Reynold's Discourses on Art, which were delivered as lectures at the Royal Academy from 1769-91 and later annotated by William Blake when it was published in book form. ...Reynolds in his third Discourse observed that 'a firm and determined outline' was essential to 'the great style of painting', and Blake in formulating his own theory of the Sublime echoed Reynolds' phrasing, insisting on a 'firm and determinate outline', for such validated 'a firm and determinate conduct on the part of Artists'. Reynolds counseled that 'every young artist' must copy 'every figure' from 'the inventions of Michel Angelo', for then the Artist would be 'nursed in the lap of grandeur.' Blake satirically responded to Reynolds' statement, emphasizing that 'every line' created by the renowned artist Michelangelo had 'Meaning'-for his well-defined outlines needed 'neither Suckling nor Weaning,' as from an attending Nurse.
Passages to India Mitchell, Charlotte; Mitchell, Gwendolen
TLS, the Times Literary Supplement,
07/2017
5964
Trade Publication Article
Mitchell et al chronicles the painting by Joshua Reynolds called "George Clive and his Family with an Indian Maid", a well-known picture, engraved by Samuel William Reynolds in 1835, exhibited in ...America as early as the 1830s, and on public display in Victorian London in the Ellesmere Collection. A hypothesis was developed, published by Henning Bock in 1979, wherein the man in the picture must be Lord Clive's first cousin George Clive (1731/2-79), who accompanied the Clives to India in 1755 and returned with them in 1760 with a modest fortune. And now re-identified as "Tysoe Saul Hancock, his wife Philadelphia, their daughter Elizabeth and their Indian maid Clarinda.
This essay offers a new reading of the Royal Academy exhibitions of late-eighteenth-century London, through a close focus on two images: Sir Joshua Reynolds's equestrian portrait of the Prince of ...Wales, shown at the 1784 exhibition, and Edward Burney's study of the crowded wall of paintings on which Reynolds's portrait hung during that year's display. "Reading the Walls" suggests that, to better understand the role and meanings of the paintings on show at the Academy in this period, we need to think more productively about the ways in which they interacted with each other across the exhibition space, and in so doing participated in a range of pictorial narratives operating beyond the boundaries of individual canvases. The essay also suggests the ways in which pictures such as Reynolds's Prince of Wales would have stimulated visitors and critics to conjure up the memory of previous Academy exhibitions, and to interpret the pictures they encountered on the Academy's walls in relation to earlier paintings that had been displayed in the same environment.
