PORTRAIT OF TWO GENTLEMEN
1778. National Gallery, London
the lowest state it had ever been in (it could not, indeed, be lower), were to be totally done away and eradicated from my mind. It was necessary, as it is expressed on a very solemn occasion, that I should become as a little child.”
Ignorance, then, was the first obstacle to be overcome. It was ignorance, as Beechey so truly points out in the introduction to his Memoir of Reynolds, ignorance of the dignity and creative powers of art, that made the works of his predecessors inferior to those of modern times; and it was the light derived from intellectual sources, operating upon a powerful and discriminating mind, that enabled him to attain a higher degree of excellence. “We may fairly assume,” Beechey continues, “that the productions of this admirable painter gave the first great stimulus to British art and showed to British artists the extent of their deficiencies and the means by which they might be remedied ... but we may venture to affirm that if he had never enjoyed the opportunities of comparing the results of his early education with the works of Italian genius, he would never have attained that high superiority which 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