Fifteen Discourses

by Sir Joshua Reynolds

This school it was which took Reynolds captive. But in yielding to colour of this kind he was not yielding to decorative colour. The rich, suffused colour on the canvas of a Tintoret or a Titian is not decorative colour at all. It is emotional colour, colour used to instil a sensation and a feeling, not to define an object. Will the reader compare in his mind the inside of St. Mark’s at Venice with the inside of St. Peter’s at Rome? Both make much use of colour, but in St. Mark’s the colour appears as a pervading deep and rich glow, governed and controlled by light and shade; in St. Peter’s it appears as a complicated pattern of variously cut marbles exposed in clear daylight. This last is the decorative use of colour, and excites no feeling at all. The former is the emotional use of it, and both excites and satisfies deep feeling. The same difference is apparent between colour as dealt with by the Venetian painters and colour as dealt with by the Northern nations before Venice’s influence had been felt.

Bearing these facts in mind, the theory and the practice of Reynolds both gain in significance. He came at the moment when the spread of that Eastern ideal of colouring, which had already been carried here and there through Europe, had become possible in England. He has himself drawn attention to this tendency it possessed to overflow and extend into other nations. “By them,” he says—that is, by Tintoret and Veronese especially—“a style merely ornamental has been disseminated throughout all Europe. Rubens carried it into Flanders, Voet to France, and Lucca Giordano to Spain and Naples.” To which he might have added, “and I myself to England.”

From the point of view of his work and example, Reynolds is to be considered as the instrument of destiny appointed to a great end, while at the same time his own slighting and inadequate criticism of this kind of colour and his humble contrition for having been led astray by it are not, if we remember his date, unintelligible. For, having behind him a national past throughout which form, and the intellectual associations suggested by form, ruled paramount, and in which the only recognised function of colour had been its decorative function, it must seem to be inevitable that, however natural an aptitude he may have possessed for judging the grandeur of form, he could have possessed little for appraising the effects of colour. The truth is that he applies to colour used as the Venetians used it exactly the kind of criticism which he might have applied to it as it was used all through the Gothic epoch. It was inbred in Reynolds that colour must be and could be only a property of form—must and could be, that is to say, only decorative. To this formula he returns again and again, and however inapplicable it may seem to the mighty Venetian canvases, we have only to put ourselves in Reynolds’s time and place to perceive that the use of it was natural and inevitable.

But all this represented, after all, only his conscious criticism and reasoning. Form is intellectual, colour emotional, and if intellectually Sir Joshua remained true to the first, emotionally he abandoned himself entirely to the last. Venice never conquered his reason, but she conquered his instincts and feelings and affections, and, for all that reason could do, for thirty years, from his return from Italy until his death, he poured forth work which owes all its power and charm to that very glow and suffusion of colour which year by year he denounced to the pupils of the Royal Academy as a delusion and a snare. It seems to me that this conquest of Sir Joshua Reynolds, in spite of all his protests and in defiance of all his reasoning, is about the most remarkable proof extant of the irresistible influence which emotional colouring can exert.

Well, then, turning to these Discourses, let us say at once that all the strictures on the great colourists which they contain do not constitute a real valuation of colour at all, but only a valuation of it by one bred in traditions of form. They have, indeed, their own great interest. They enable us to realise, more vividly than anything else I can think of, the limitations and one-sidedness of art in England in the days before Reynolds’s own painting achievements had helped to lay the basis of a truer standard in criticism than any he himself possessed or could possess. Here their interest is unique. But as criticism we may pass them by. No one, indeed, has refuted them more ably than Sir Joshua himself. His real and genuine estimate of colour is to be found, not in what he said, but in what he did.

On the other hand, perhaps the very solidity and unity of that great Northern tradition which stretched behind him gave a simplicity and power to his analysis of form which it would scarcely in a later day have possessed. Certainly I do not know where else in English art criticism are to be found such clear and weighty definitions of what grandeur of style consists in as occur throughout these Discourses. The principle of the selection of essential traits, or those common to the species, together with the elimination of accidental ones, or those peculiar to the individual, which may be said to underlie his whole theory of the grand style, is indeed that principle on which art itself is founded, and the recognition of which has made the difference in all ages between the cultured and ignorant, between the artist who simplifies and the artist who complicates, between Greek and barbarian. It is little to the point to say that this principle is already familiar to us, and that we have no need of further instruction in it, for it is with this as with other truths that matter, which become dimmed and stale in the world, and lose their meaning and have to be reaffirmed from time to time by some great teacher with emphasis and power.

It is in their powerful handling of first principles in all that regards form that the value of these lectures lies. It is this also which gives them for the present age their character of an antidote. There are times during which the national life, uncertain and fluctuating in convictions and aims, is incapable of inspiring art with any definite impulse whatsoever. These, for art, are melancholy days—days divested of all tradition and agreement—which it occupies rather in experimenting on its own methods and processes than in producing definite constructive work. Such experiments, however, are taken very seriously by contemporaries, and all kinds of ingenious, far-fetched tricks are played in paint or marble with as much zeal as if they formed part of a genuine creative movement. Art criticism, it is needless to say, follows the lead of art, and analyses these fugitive individual experiments as solemnly as if they were an authentic expression of the life of their age. The combined effect of this kind of art and this kind of art criticism on a disinterested stranger would probably be that, far from conceiving of art as a very important and vitally human affair, he would conclude that it was an extremely clever and ingenious kind of juggling, which, however interesting to cliques and coteries, could be no concern of mankind in general.

There is no doubt that the best way, or only way, of counteracting this tendency to triviality, to which in an experimental age we are liable, is now and then to have recourse to those primitive and fixed principles of art which are the same in all ages, and obedience to which alone constitutes a passport to the regard of all ages. Only, in order that such principles may be made acceptable and attractive, it is essential that they should be treated with that directness and simplicity which an intimate consciousness of their truth inspires. They are so treated in these Discourses, and the consequence of their being so treated is that just as a reader wearied by the trivialities of contemporary poetry or the arguments of contemporary theology may find rest and refreshment by turning over a page or two of Wordsworth or Thomas à Kempis, so in something the same way at least, though perhaps in a less degree, he may be brought closer again to the reality he had lost touch of in matters of art by turning from the art criticism of the newspapers to the lectures of Sir Joshua Reynolds.

Discourses delivered in the Royal Academy, 1769-1791 (published separately).

Seven Discourses delivered in the Royal Academy (1769-76), 1778. Edited by H. Morley (Cassell’s National Library), 1888.