Joshua reynolds grand style

Sir Joshua Reynolds 16 July — 23 February was an English painter who specialised in portraits. The art critic John Russell called him one of the major European painters of the 18th century, [ 1 ] while Lucy Peltz says he was "the leading portrait artist of the 18th-century and arguably one of the greatest artists in the history of art.

Reynolds had a famously prolific studio that produced over 2, paintings during his lifetime. His father had been a fellow of Balliol College, Oxford , but did not send any of his sons to the university. As a boy, he also came under the influence of Zachariah Mudge , whose Platonistic philosophy stayed with him all his life. Reynolds' annotated copy was lost for nearly two hundred years until it appeared in a Cambridge bookshop, inscribed with the signature "J.

Reynolds Pictor".

Grand manner portraiture

It is now in the collection of the Royal Academy of Arts, London. Having shown an early interest in art, Reynolds was apprenticed in to the fashionable London portrait painter Thomas Hudson , who like Reynolds had been born in Devon. He returned to London before the end of , but following his father's death in late he shared a house in Plymouth Dock with his sisters.

While with the ship he visited Lisbon, Cadiz, Algiers and Minorca. From Minorca he travelled to Livorno in Italy, and then to Rome, [ 14 ] where he spent two years, [ 15 ] studying the Old Masters and acquiring a taste for the "Grand Style".