Not that Reynolds must be regarded in any sense as a revolutionary. It would be truer to say that he was a revivalist. We may smile at Whistler’s naïve “Why drag in Velasquez?” but in the “originality” of Reynolds’s Commodore Keppel and Captain Orme we see no more than the fruits of a great mind fertilised by the continuous study of Vandyck and the Italian masters. In a gallery of the great portraits of the world, these achievements of Reynolds would fall as naturally into line with those of the older masters as the regular productions of the fashionable portrait painters of to-day assimilate with the thousands of pictures amongst which they are hung upon the walls of the Royal Academy. One might have said of them as Shakespeare said of the works of Time:
“Thy pyramids built up with newer might
To me are nothing novel, nothing strange,
They are but dressings of a former sight.”
With all, or even a few, of the splendid series of male portraits, of which these two of Captain Orme and Lord Ligonier may be taken as the beginning, it is impossible to deal in so short a memoir. Among the most magnificent is that of Mr. Fane and his two guardians, from the Earl of Westmorland’s collection, which is now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. This must have been painted at the best period of Reynolds’s career, and shows him at the very top of his achievement in the painting of portraits of men. Not far below it, however, is the Lord Heathfield, which is here reproduced. This was one of the last portraits he painted, and yet shows little signs of diminishing vigour in the artist’s mind or hand.
The Lord Heathfield was exhibited in 1788, with sixteen other portraits, in addition to the Infant Hercules, Muscipula, and the Sleeping Girl. It is now in the National Gallery, and though it has suffered somewhat from injury and retouching, it forms a noble close to the chapter opened, so to speak, nearly thirty years back by the two other warriors, Orme and Ligonier, with whom we started. Constable, taking it as an example of what a picture may express besides the actual likeness of the sitter, aptly describes it as “almost a history of the defence of Gibraltar. The distant sea with a glimpse of the opposite coast expresses the locality, and the cannon, pointed downward, the height of the rock on which the hero stands, with the chain of the massive key of the fortress twice passed round his hand as to secure it in his grasp. He seems to say, ‘I have you, and will keep you!’ ”
With portraits of women Reynolds was even more successful in his early days. Besides the exhibition of pictures in the April of the year 1761, when the Captain Orme and the Lord Ligonier opened the public eyes in wonder at the achievements of the new painter, the marriage and coronation of King George III in September contributed, incidentally, to advance the reputation of Reynolds in the portraiture of women. Of the ten noble and lovely bridesmaids who bore the train of the Queen, three of the most beautiful were painted by him in this year, namely, the Ladies Caroline Russell, Elizabeth Keppel, and Sarah Lenox. The first portrait, which is now at Woburn Abbey, is a half-length; Lady Caroline is seated, in a garden, with a Blenheim spaniel in her lap, presumably the gift of the Duke of Marlborough, whom she married the next year. The other two, at Quidenham and Holland House, are better known from having been mezzotinted. The former is a forecast, as it were, of the famous trio at the National Gallery, Lady Elizabeth being represented at full length, decorating a statue of Hymen. The composition is enriched by the contrast of a negress, who holds up the wreaths of flowers to her mistress.
Lady Sarah Lenox shares the honours of her picture with Lady Susan Strangways and Charles James Fox. She leans from a low window at Holland House to take a dove from Lady Susan, while Fox—then quite a youth—with a manuscript in his hand, urges them to come to a rehearsal of some private theatricals. Of groups such as these it is much to be regretted that Reynolds did not paint more. With his comprehensive knowledge of the Old Masters he was better qualified than any English painter to attempt them, and his youthful achievement of the Eliot group, already mentioned, showed his natural capabilities before he had been to Italy at all. It was possibly because Hogarth, and his minor imitators, had made the “conversation piece” their own, and that when he did paint a group, as the Ladies Waldegrave, or the three ladies decorating a Term of Hymen, he saw no way but “the grand style,” and sought to immortalise rather than to portray so much beauty collected together. With men he was occasionally more prosaic, as is witnessed by the two groups of the Dilettanti Society, now in the basement of the Grafton Gallery; though we know that in this instance he took Paul Veronese as his guide.
Let us now turn to the other two—Lady Elizabeth Keppel and Lady Caroline Russell—as the prototypes of his more usual portraits of ladies, the whole and the half-length.
A complete full-length picture of a woman offers more difficulties of pose, proportion, light, colour, or any other particular, than are overcome by any but a few of the greatest painters. Holbein has given us the Duchess of Milan, and no more; and of all the full-length portraits of Elizabeth and the ladies of her time, how many are there that have any but historical or personal interest? In England Vandyck alone succeeded in painting a picture of a complete woman, and when he was gone the chance of immortality for women—I mean in pictures—was gone too. I can recall no single whole-length portrait of Lely or Kneller that is anything more than a conventional representation of the person.
With the Lady Elizabeth Keppel we are back to Vandyck again. With a painter who could achieve a portrait like this, woman once again had the chance of pictorial salvation, and like the sensible creature that she is, jumped at it without any hesitation. To sit for her portrait was now no longer a duty to her family, a bore, or at best a mere vanity, but a thrill.
Mrs. Bonfoy, one of the daughters of Lord Eliot in the family group of 1746, was among the first to experience it, sitting to Reynolds again for a half-length in 1754. This portrait is still at Port Eliot, and is described by Leslie as “one of his most beautiful female portraits, and in perfect preservation. The lady is painted as a half-length in a green dress, with one hand on her hip, and the head turned, with that inimitable ease and