The true heir to the Old Masters

It wasn't merely brilliant brushwork or sparkling colour that made Sir Joshua Reynolds one of England's greatest portraitists. His talent for friendship nurtured his extraordinary career, says Susan Jenkins

- Susan Jenkins

LITTLE in Sir Joshua Reynolds’s early days suggested his works would one day grace the walls of most museum and country-house collections in the UK. Yet the son of a Devon clergyman—he was born in Plympton, Devon, on July 16, 1723—shrugged off his modest beginnings as a painter in Plymouth Dock (now Devonport) to become the greatest portrait artist England has ever seen. A founder and the first president of the new Royal Academy of Arts in 1768, he was knighted by George III in 1769, lived and worked in a magnificent house in Leicester Fields (now Square) attended by servants in livery and was eventually appointed Principal Painter to the King in 1784.

Reynolds’s extraordinary rise to fame was testament to his unique skills. These were a rare combination of brilliant brushwork, an innovative and intellectual approach to his art and an ability to make friends and inspire loyalty in the right places. Although his sister Fanny, his sometime housekeeper, called him a ‘gloomy tyrant’, his pupil James Northcote wrote fondly: ‘I know him thoroughly and all his faults, I am sure, and yet almost worship him.’

Arriving in London, in 1740, as an apprentice to the fashionable Devon-born portraitist Thomas Hudson, Reynolds returned home to the West Country in 1743. Ten years later, he set up his own studio back in the capital, following a career-changing passage to the Mediterranean with Commodore Augustus Keppel (1725–86), son of the 2nd Earl of Albemarle, and a period of study in Rome. An early portrait dating from this time depicts Catherine Moore, soon-to-be wife of his future fellow Royal Academician the architect William Chambers. Painted in about 1752–56, it is now part of the Iveagh Bequest at Kenwood House, London NW3.