Since March 2010 I have been working as an associate artist for Plymouth Museum.
I have made some work at Saltram House and Mount Edgecumbe as well as working at the museum. The Saltram house drawings are being made into a leaflet – a draft copy can be found in the Saltram section.
Below is piece I was asked to write for the museum about Sir Joshua Renolds
A portrait painter is in the unusual position of concentrating on an aspect of nature which triggers attention – the face. We read so much from the most minute changes of expression that flow across the face that our focus on looking at a portrait is automatically distracted from the overall composition of the painting. Yet for the artist, particularly in the case of Joshua Reynolds, building that composition is central to the art of painting.
In the first part of the 20th century, art theory concentrated on the formal qualities of a work of art and attempted to separate those qualities from the context in which the work was produced. This created a backlash. Now we look at the purpose of a work in a historical context and from a lofty vantage point can pass judgement not only on the work itself but the artist’s relationship with society – and society is often given as much credit as the artist for the production of the work.
Joshua Reynolds painted portraits of the rich at a time in British history when Samuel Johnson could state “There are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting money.” without being thought an idiot. Our association of 18th c society with slavery and colonialisation apart from anything else, means that such humour can pass us by.
Joshua Reynolds was a reasonable man and paints reasonable people. Whether one takes the view summed up by Goethe “Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help them to become what they are capable of being.” as a justification for his amiable well mannered aristocrats or point out that one cannot judge 18th c people by 21st c standards, we still find it difficult to reconcile Reynold’s depictions of people with their historical reputations. So in his portrait of Banastre Tarleton, we look in vain for evidence of Horace Walpole’s statement that “Tarleton boasts of having BUTCHERED more MEN and Lain with more women than anybody else in the ARMY.”
Tarleton is bending down to adjust his boots in the midst of battle, the epitome of the British ideal of coolness under fire. Reynold’s is painting an ideal. He is using his knowledge of art history (behind Tarleton there is a horse and a banner that demonstrate his love of Venetian painting and Tarleton’s pose is based on a well known statue from Ancient Greece of a beautiful athlete) to create a work which mixes up a specific individual with a timeless archetype. It is an aspirational vision.
He paints people retaining their humanity in positions of power. When painting aristocrats, the spectator is usually placed in a kneeling position, looking up at the sitter, but despite an almost imperceptible bowing of the head towards us, the sitter appears to meet our eye.
His ideal is not concerned with power and wealth as such but with the ability to remain civilised in possession of such potentially corrupting attributes. We are simultaneously beneath the sitter yet on level terms; because this wealthy, powerful individual has kept their humanity intact. What politician today would not choose to have their portrait painted by Reynold’s today? While David Cameron has to make do with a web cam showing him washing the dishes, by commissioning Joshua Reynolds he could be shown as simultaneously powerful and genial, distant yet approachable. Reynold’s would have been horrified at the photo shopped images that adorn today’s campaigning posters. They are not subtle enough.
The engaging quality of his work comes not only through the expression on people’s faces or the accoutrements with which Reynold’s surrounds them but via the composition. The rhythms are gentle, the colours measured (albeit the state of his colour occasionally makes such statements questionable; he did not use stable pigments)
Even if he takes models from the Italian Renaissance, such as borrowing a Virgin and Mary pose for a mother and daughter, he softens the imposing hierarchic elements – leaving the super structure intact but offering a warmer welcome.
Reynolds might borrow the pose of a Pope or an untouchable Italian aristocrat to paint Gordon Brown or David Cameron, but the flow of the line would be more kindly. The tight direction of the eye around the canvas would embrace the spectator and once within the composition they would find it hard to extricate themselves. The difference in compositional terms between this approach and offering a closed complex highly organised network which excludes the viewer and commands admiration is surprisingly slight and is often to do with the speed at which the eye can grasp the pattern of the work. Slow down the eye’s journey across a hierarchic figure and the command structure is not so obvious.
There are hardly any pictures by Reynold’s that can be described as disturbing.
There are two startling exceptions, “Cupid as a link boy” and “Mercury as a cut purse”. Reynolds painted a good number of prostitutes. Link boys were children who offered to light your way through the dark streets of London by means of a flaming torch. They were also thought to be sexually available. The phallic position of the boy’s torch and the black wings on his back (very unlike the usual golden feathers which usually adorn Cupid’s wings) make for troubling viewing. Whether he painted it, as Robert Hughes asserts “to remind those in the know of the proclivities of a certain patron”, as social commentary or as a recognition of some darker stain within his own character is impossible to say. “Mercury as a cut purse” shows a small boy holding a stolen purse and leering towards the spectator – its not a subtle picture.
An absence of troubling elements is not regarded as much of a virtue in art today. I remember as a child, being told that one of the great virtues of Great Britain was the fact that it had avoided revolutions; that change had come gradually; our rulers had bent with the pressure for social reform. (I remember this statement because to a teenager, it was disagreeable) This ideal of gradual change which enables us to conserve what is good while adjusting to better and fairer ways is attractive. It simplifies reality and provides a model which is both aspirational and practical – although history, in viewing the horrors that are necessarily condoned, or at least left unchallenged is usually far less tolerant.
Reynolds broke new ground in portraiture. Part of the way that he did that was to graft European models of picture making onto British portrait painting. He broke with tradition by grafting a new tradition onto the native strain. More importantly though, he came to his patrons as an outsider, from a lower class, who where he could, asserted his equality with his sitters. He did not wish to overthrow but to be assimilated. He did not carve out a space for himself but occupied empty ground that no-one had used before.
And he wished to take other artists with him.
Today, where once he was seen as a representative of a progressive ideal he now represents the class that he painted. He was assimilated. He was reasonable.