Successful as he was in expressing the moods of men and the fascination of women, it is impossible in writing of the charm of Reynolds to forget the part the children play in his work. It would be hard indeed to find a painter who has expressed the joy and happiness of childhood with equal effect. Some of the children so depicted are seen with their mothers, and one feels that the portrait was painted more for the mother than for the child; but there are many canvases from which the children alone smile at us, captured for our time in all their youthful radiance though some have lain for a century dead. The children of Lady Smythe stand happily apart from their rather self-conscious mother, and among the single-figure portraits of children are Lady Catherine Pelham Clinton, Lady Caroline Howard, Miss Emma Hart (afterwards Lady Hamilton), Charles, Viscount Althorp, Miss Bowles the Strawberry Girl, "The Age of Innocence," "The Infant Samuel," and many others that the mind and the memory love to dwell upon. How pleasant it is to remember that Nature so careless of the individual is so careful of the type that it blossoms anew with every generation!
Having written, however briefly, of the children in Reynolds' picture, it seems unnecessary to say more of his charm; they will stand for it until the end comes, the hour when the pigments can endure no longer and the labour of the master is ended.
There is little to add to the story of Sir Joshua after he became President of the Royal Academy. Down to 1789, when sickness came suddenly upon him, his was a prosperous career, passed in the most stimulating company of his age, associated with foreign travel and delightful English holidays. Only once in all these later years does his critical insight appear to have failed him, and this was when he went to Holland and remained unmoved by the work of Franz Hals. What, one wonders, did he see or fail to see when he stood before the portrait of the Laughing Cavalier and the musician (Der Vaar), the painter's wife and the market girl? Londoners mourned when Reynolds' life came to an end, and they buried him with much pomp and ceremony by the side of Sir Christopher Wren. But he may well be content with the measure of his own immortality. No British portrait painter has seriously challenged his supremacy, and few may hope to rival his output. The Graves and Cronin catalogue mention three thousand pictures and probably leave well over a thousand unnamed. It is possible for the amateur to name a hundred examples of his portraiture, any of which would have justified a claim to posthumous honours.
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