Reynolds said of his friend: "His pride had no meanness in it; there was nothing little or mean about him.
"Truth, whether in great or little matters, he held sacred. From the violation of truth, he said, in great things your character or your interest was affected, in lesser things your pleasure is equally destroyed. I remember, on his relating some incident, I added something to his relation, which I supposed might likewise have happened: 'It would have been a better story,' says he, 'if it had been so; but it was not.' Our friend, Dr. Goldsmith, was not so scrupulous; but he said he only indulged himself in white lies, light as feathers, which he threw up in the air, and, on whomever they fell, nobody was hurt. 'I wish,' says Dr. Johnson, 'you would take the trouble of moulting your feathers.'
"As in his writings not a line can be found which a saint would wish to blot, so in his life he would never suffer the least immorality or indecency of conversation, or anything contrary to virtue or piety, to proceed without a severe check, which no elevation of rank exempted them from.
"The Christian religion was with him such a certain and established truth that he considered it as a kind of profanation to hold any argument about its truth."
At sixty-three years of age, Reynolds was as busy as ever. Miss Palmer wrote to her cousin in Calcutta: "My uncle seems more bewitched than ever with his palette and pencils. He is painting from morning till night, and the truth is that every picture he does seems better than the former. He is just going to begin a picture for the Empress of Russia, who has sent to desire he will paint her an historical one. The subject is left to his own choice, and at present he is undetermined what to choose."
He chose "The Infant Hercules strangling the Serpents." Rogers says: "Reynolds, who was always thinking of his art, was one day walking with Dr. Lawrence, near Beaconsfield, when they met a fine rosy little peasant boy—a son of Burke's bailiff. Reynolds patted him on the head, and, after looking earnestly in his face, said: 'I must give more color to my Infant Hercules.'" He took such great pains with this work that he used to say of the picture: "There are ten under it, some better, some worse." The Empress sent him as pay for this a gold box, with her cipher in diamonds, and seven thousand five hundred dollars.
In his "Gleaners," painted in 1788, the centre figure, with a sheaf of corn on her head, was the portrait of a beautiful girl, Miss Potts, who afterwards became the mother of Sir Edwin Landseer.
In 1789, he lost the sight of his left eye, through overwork, but he still preserved the sweet serenity of his nature, and was not depressed. He amused himself with his canary bird, which was so tame that it would sit upon his hand; but one morning it flew out of the window, and never returned.
On December 10, 1790, Reynolds gave his fifteenth and last Discourse to the Academy. In closing, he said to the crowded audience: "I reflect, not without vanity, that these Discourses bear testimony of my admiration of that truly divine man; and I should desire that the last words I should pronounce in this Academy and from this place might be the name of Michael Angelo."
As Reynolds descended from the chair, Edmund Burke stepped forward, and, taking his hand, addressed him in the words of Milton,—