For Johnson's "Idler" Reynolds wrote three papers, sitting up one whole night to complete them, and by so doing was made ill for a time.
He also painted a young lad, the son of Dr. Mudge, who was very anxious to visit his father on his sixteenth birthday, but was prevented through illness. "Never mind, I will send you to your father," said Reynolds, and he sent a speaking likeness, which was of course a gift. He seldom, however, made presents of his pictures, for he said they were usually not valued unless paid for.
About this time, Sir William Lowther, a young millionnaire, died, leaving twenty-five thousand dollars to each of thirteen companions. Each companion very properly commissioned Reynolds to paint for him the portrait of so considerate and generous a friend.
In 1758 and 1759, the artist was overwhelmed with work. In one year there were one hundred and fifty sitters, among them the Prince of Wales, afterwards George III.; Lady Mary Coke, afterwards believed to have been secretly married to the Duke of York, brother of George III.; and the fair and frail Kitty Fisher, very agreeable and vivacious, speaking French with great fluency, who died five years after her marriage, "a victim of cosmetics," it is said. Sir Joshua painted seven beautiful portraits of her. The most interesting represents her holding a dove in her lap, while its mate is about to descend to it from a sofa on which she is reclining. There are three of these, one being in the Lenox collection in New York.
Reynolds also painted the famous Garrick this year, and thirteen years later Garrick and his wife. Leslie writes: "Reynolds had to light the eyes with that meteoric sensibility, and to kindle the features with that fire of life which would deepen into the passion of Lear, sparkle in the vivacity of Mercutio, or tremble in the fatuousness of Abel Drugger. He had to paint the man who, of all men that ever lived, presents the most perfect type of the actor; quick in sympathy, vivid in observation, with a body and mind so plastic that they could take every mould, and give back the very form and pressure of every passion, fashion, action; delighted to give delight, and spurred to ever higher effort by the reflection of the effect produced on others, no matter whether his audience were the crowd of an applauding theatre, a table full of noblemen and wits, a nursery group of children, or a solitary black boy in an area; of inordinate vanity, at once the most courteous, genial, sore, and sensitive of men; full of kindliness, yet always quarrelling; scheming for applause even in the society of his most intimate friends; a clever writer, a wit and the friend of wits.
"Mrs. Garrick, though always the delight and charm of Garrick's house, was now no longer the lovely, light-limbed, laughing Eva Maria Violette, for love of whom Garrick, twenty-five years before, had dressed in woman's clothes that he might slip a letter into her chair, without compromising her, or offending her watchful protectress, Lady Burlington, and who had witched the world as a dancer, while she won friends among the titled and the great by her grace, good-humor, and modest sweetness of disposition. In Lord Normanton's gallery is a most fascinating sketch of her, which must have been painted in the first years of Sir Joshua's acquaintance with her. Slight as it is, those who have seen will not easily forget it. In the picture of her sitting with her husband, painted this year, she appears of matronly character, with a handsome, sensitive, kindly face; the dress is painted with singular force and freedom."
In 1759, Reynolds painted his first Venus, reclining in a wooded landscape, while Cupid looks in through the boughs. Mason, the poet, writes: "When he was painting his first Venus, I was frequently near his easel; and although before I came to town his picture was in some forwardness, and the attitude entirely decided, yet I happened to visit him when he was finishing the head from a beautiful girl of sixteen, who, as he told me, was his man Ralph's daughter, and whose flaxen hair, in fine natural curls, flowed behind her neck very gracefully.
"But a second casual visit presented me with a very different object; he was then painting the body, and in his sitting chair a very squalid beggar-woman was placed, with a child, not above a year old, quite naked, upon her lap. As may be imagined, I could not help testifying my surprise at seeing him paint the carnation of the goddess of beauty from that of a little child, which seemed to have been nourished rather with gin than with milk, and saying that 'I wondered he had not taken some more healthy-looking model;' but he answered, with his usual naïveté, that, 'whatever I might think, the child's flesh assisted him in giving a certain morbidezza to his own coloring, which he thought he should hardly arrive at had he not such an object, when it was extreme (as it certainly was), before his eyes."
Among the many famous portraits of this year and the next was that of the Countess Waldegrave, Horace Walpole's beautiful niece Maria, afterwards Duchess of Gloucester. The earl was the most trusted friend of George II., and, for a short time, prime minister. Walpole mentions the countess being mobbed in the park one Sunday when in company with Lady Coventry, so that several sergeants of the guards marched before and behind them to keep off the admiring crowd. Also that of the beautiful Elizabeth Gunning, afterward Duchess of Argyle, and the sister of Admiral Keppel, afterwards Marchioness of Tavistock. "This is one of the painter's loveliest and best preserved female portraits. The dress is white, with a rose in the bosom, and the expression inimitably maidenly and gentle."
This year, Reynolds removed to a fine home in Leicester Square, where he remained as long as he lived, having a suburban home at Richmond Villa. His own painting-room was octagonal, "about twenty feet long and sixteen in breadth. The window which gave the light to the room was square, and not much larger than one-half the size of a common window in a private house; whilst the lower part of this window was nine feet four inches from the floor. The chair for his sitters was raised eighteen inches from the floor, and turned on casters. His palettes were those which are held by a handle, not those held on the thumb. The stocks of his pencils were long, measuring about nineteen inches. He painted in that part of the room nearest to the window, and never sat down when he worked."