title="{14}"/>is now so universally allowed to him ... it was the study of those principles on which Raphael and Michel Angelo had formed their comprehensive and elevated views of nature which first enabled Reynolds to perceive his own deficiencies, to appreciate the value of intellectual art, and to employ it in dignifying that of his country.”

This was written, be it observed, in 1835, at a time when the art of portraiture was fast descending from the heights to which Reynolds, Gainsborough and Romney had raised it to depths almost as low as those in which it had sunk a century earlier. Hoppner and Lawrence, the last of the great men, had left no one to carry on the tradition, and had contributed in some measure to its extinction by faults of manner which were fatally easy to imitate. Shallow and slipshod imitation soon became the fashionable cloak to cover the bare bones of the old skeleton—ignorance—and the early Victorian age could produce nothing in the way of portraiture which is now looked at without contempt.

As to the methods by which this ignorance was to be overcome, it is to be observed that when lecturing at the Academy in his later days Sir Joshua was constantly urging upon the students the necessity for generalisation. “The man of true genius,” he says, “instead of spending all his hours, as many artists do while they are at Rome, in measuring statues and copying pictures, soon begins to think for himself, and endeavours to do something like what he sees. I consider general copying a delusive kind of industry.” And again, “Instead of copying the touches of those great masters, copy only their conceptions; instead of treading in their footsteps, endeavour only to keep the same road; labour to invent on their general principles and way of thinking; possess yourself with their spirit; consider with yourself how a Michel Angelo or a Raphael would have treated this subject, and work yourself into a belief that your picture is to be seen and criticised by them when completed; even an attempt of this kind will rouse your powers.”

That this determination to look at his art in the broadest possible spirit was the dominant factor in his success is continually evident at every point in his career. The breadth and sincerity of this view are so faithfully reflected in every single work he achieved that it seems rather to character than to genius that he owes his high place among painters. That it was not so may be readily admitted when we remember other painters—for instance, Benjamin West and George Morland—who were gifted with one or other of those two qualities only; but the combination of the two carried Reynolds as high as Gainsborough, and far higher than any one else. “One who has a genius,” he writes (as early as 1759), “will comprehend in his idea the whole of his work at once; whilst he who is deficient in genius amuses himself in trifling parts of small consideration, attends with scrupulous exactness to the minuter matters only, which he finishes to a nicety, whilst the whole together has a very ill effect.”

This striving after generalisation, seeing things whole, is noticed by Edmund Burke as almost the chief characteristic of Reynolds’s genius. Malone requested Burke to “throw his thoughts on paper relative to Sir Joshua,” at the time when he was preparing his Life, and Burke complied with the request in the following short summary, which is printed in Leslie and Taylor’s Life of Sir Joshua.

“He was a great generaliser, and was fond of reducing everything to one system; more, perhaps, than the variety of principles which operate in the human mind, and in every human work, will properly endure. But this disposition to abstractions, generalisations and classifications is the great glory

MRS. CARNAC

1778. Wallace Collection, London

of the human mind; that, indeed, which most distinguishes man from other animals, and is the source of everything that can be called science.

“I believe his early acquaintance with Mr. Mudge, of Exeter [the Rev. Zachariah Mudge, a dissenting minister], a very learned and thinking man, much inclined to philosophise in the spirit of the Platonists, disposed him to this habit. He certainly by that means liberalised in a high degree the theory of his own art; and if he had been more methodically instituted in the early part of his life, and had possessed more leisure for study and reflection, he would in my opinion have pursued this method with great success.

“He had a strong turn for humour, and well saw the weak sides of things. He enjoyed every circumstance of his good fortune and had no affectation on that subject. And I do not know a fault or weakness of his that he did not convert into something that bordered on a virtue, instead of pushing it to the confines of a vice. E. B.”

“Genius,” Johnson wrote, “is chiefly exerted in historical pictures, and the art of the painter of portraits is often lost in the obscurity of the subject. But it is in painting as in life: what is greatest is not always best. I should grieve to see Reynolds transfer to heroes and to goddesses, to empty splendour and to airy fiction, that art which is now employed in diffusing friendship, in renewing tenderness, in quickening the affections of the absent and continuing the presence of the dead. Every man is always present to himself, and has therefore little need of his own resemblance; nor can he desire it but for the sake of those whom he loves and by whom he hopes to be remembered. This use of the art is a natural and reasonable consequence of affection, and though, like all other human actions, it is often complicated with pride, yet even such pride is more laudable than that by which palaces are covered with pictures that, however excellent, neither imply the owners virtue nor excite it.”

This was written to combat the assertion that Sir Joshua, in confining himself to portraiture, was hardly practising what he was always preaching. But preaching was very much wanted at this stage of the development of art in England, though not exactly the preaching of the Established Church. The Dean of Gloucester had said on the occasion of a meeting of the Society of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, that he thought a pinmaker was a more useful and valuable member of society than Raphael. Reynolds was of the contrary opinion, which he committed to paper:

“This is an observation of a very narrow mind; a mind that is confined to the mere object of commerce; that sees with a microscopic eye but a part of the great machine of the economy of life, and thinks that small part which he sees to be the whole.

“Commerce is the means, not the end, of happiness or pleasure. The end is a rational enjoyment of life by means of arts and sciences. It is therefore the highest degree of folly to set the means in a higher rank of esteem than the accomplished end. It is as much as to say that the brickmaker is a more useful member of society than the architect who employs him. The usefulness of the brickmaker is acknowledged, but the rank of him and of the architect are very different.

“No man deserves better of mankind than he who has the art of opening sources of intellectual pleasure and instruction by means of the senses.”

On his return from his three years’ tour in 1752 Reynolds lost no time in setting up his easel as a professional painter in London. The effects of his studies in