MR. TOM TAYLOR'S LIFE AND TIMES OF SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS.*
SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS was born in 1723, the year of Sir Christopher Wren's death. He died aged sixty-nine in 1792, the year in which Benjamin West was elected President of the Royal Academy. Sir Joshua's father, Samuel Reynolds,—painted by the son, "a ruddy, round-faced, smooth-visaged man, almost bald, and with a sweet and placid expression,"—was a clergyman, schoolmaster, and former fellow of Balliol College, Oxford,—so innocent-hearted, simple-minded, and so absent, that his friends "likened him to Fielding's Parson Adams." The parentage of great men, always curious, is seldom suggestive in the pro- portion of their fame. In the case of Sir Joshua Reynolds, it may please some minds to trace the rustic simplicity and gentle- ness of the father and scholar in the worldly simplicity and gentle- ness of the son and. painter. Allan Cunningham has supposed that the painter's early education was neglected by the absent schoolmaster, and his supposition seems to have been founded on sundry cases of misspelling. The first Napoleon could not be said to be uneducated, yet he could hardly spell twenty con- secutive words. In idle hours, when his memory was not touched by discussion and the natural sequence of association, he constantly betrayed gross ignorance of common things, and, which was still more astonishing to the clever men around him, he often seemed wildly ignorant of the commonest facts in his favourite study—history, while at other times, when warmed into argument, he .astonished them by the minute- ness and reconditeness of his acquirements and the brilliancy and grandeur of his historical generalizations. In this respect Sir Joshua Reynolds, so fundamentally unlike him in most other things, greatly resembled that emperor. He inherited from his father a singular and happy carelessness about trifles, which contrasted curiously with his extreme diligence and his theory of minute devotion to his calling. "If you take too much care of yourself, Nature will cease to take care of you," was "a noble maxim out of the mouth of a Mr. Mudge" which Samuel
• Luken : Murray.
Reynolds was fond of quoting, and he probably translated it for the benefit of hi children into, "If you take too much care of a child's education, he will cease to take care of his own." Mr. Taylor shows that Sir Joshua did take care, an almost Amber- leian care, of his own education, whether his father neglected it or not. "He was fond of literary composition. . . . The earliest accounts of him prove him to have been a thinker. In his boy- hood he composed rules of conduct for himself." (One of these, another variation on "the noble maxim of Mr. Mudge," was that the great principle of being happy in this world is not to mind, or be affected with, small things. Sir Joshua carefully adhered to it through life.) It is plain, too, that he must have acquired a considerable amount of Latin, from the deference paid to his scholarship by Johnson, and what he acquired of it must have been acquired in early life. Besides, a school Ovid of his, well thumbed, is now in the possession of his grand-nephew, Mr. Reynolds Gwatkin.
Drawing of some sort seams to have been a favourite amuse- ment with the " ten, or eleven, or twelve" children of whom Joshua was one. But he was the least expert, and the others nicknamed him the clown in consequence. As in many other instances, the clown of the family ripened into the greater man. Eagles take more growing than sparrows. One of the truest symptoms of future eminence is not early success, but the early formation of lofty ideals, and the tendency in early life to be inflamed with the description of lofty ideals, in short a capacity and tendency to gaze at the sun. In later life the earlier ideals have faded away or given place to others, but not without having left their mark on the mental stature. The earlier enthusiasms may die, do die, the habits of thought remain. Sir Joshua when a boy read an inflated treatise by Richardson on the prospects of English art, which he afterwards told Malone "so delighted and inflamed his mind that Raphael appeared to him superior to the most illus- trious names of ancient or modern time." The engravings in Dryden's edition of Plutarch's Lives, but still more Jacob Cat's celebrated Book of Emblems, also made an early impression upon him. At twelve he had painted a tolerably bad portrait of the Rev. Thomas Smart, tutor in the family of the future first Lord Edgecumbe. But his fates were still weighing. He nar- rowly escaped being made an apothecary, and indeed was sensible enough when the question was mooted to tell his father, who dabbled in pharmacy, he would rather be an apothecary than an ORDINARY painter. Later in life, when he set up a coach, em- blazoned by Catton with the four seasons, and his sister, a shy woman, whom he commanded to drive in it alone, objected to it as too fine, he said, "What, would you have one like an apothecary's carriage '?" But he was now only seventeen. The end of it was that his father paid 1201. as a premium to apprentice him to Hudson, a pupil of the Richardson whose books had fired Joshua's mind, and whose pictures Sir Joshua, looking over them half a century later, described as "cold and hard," though "scientifically good." Two years later, while Joshua was still under Hudson, Dr. Huxham, looking at a drawing of Laocoon, said "that he who drew that would be the first hand in Eng- land." Meanwhile the lad writes to his father that "he is the happiest creature alive." He is sent one day to a sale of pictures and obtains a surreptitious shake of the hand with the author of the "Rape of the Lock," as Pope moves up through the crowd, amid loud whispers of "Mr. Pope, Mr. Pope," and shaking hands on all sides with his friends, shakes the hand of Joshua thrust out boy-like under some one else's arm. Suddenly, in a fit of jealousy it seems, Hudson turns him out of doors with- out warning upon a trumpery pretext, and the boy returns to Devonshire. His success, however, was now sealed. In a short time he "had painted twenty portraits," including that of the Lieutenant-Governor of Plymouth, and "had ten more bespoke." So his old father wrote, who was fond and proud of his son. Hudson seems to have thought better of his jealousy. Joshua on his side was of a remarkably sweet and easy temperament. The reconciliation was soon effected, and shortly after his return to London he painted the portrait of Captain Hamilton, which is said to have been the first picture which brought him into notice. His disagreement with Hudson, though of no long duration, had borne fruits, however, and later he looked back to it with com- placency as having emancipated him from "the tameness and insipidity of his master." He did not look back with complacency on the three years which followed the death of his father soon after, "passed," as he told Malone, "in company from whom little improvement could be got ;" and when he recollected this period of his life he always spoke of it "as so much time thrown :sway- s° far at least as related to a knowledge of the world and man-
kind." Whether this is meant as a reflection upon his two un- married sisters, with whom he resided after his father's death at Plymouth Dock, or whether more is intended than exactly meets the eye, it is difficult to say. But however this may be, it was during that time that he fell in with Gandy of Exeter's pictures, and took to heart that precept of Gandy's which he never forgot, that "a picture ought to have a richness in its texture, as if the colours had been composed of cream and cheese, and the reverse
of a hard and dusky or dry manner." We cannot recal a picture by Sir Joshua Reynolds in which there is no cream or cheese -somewhere.
In 1749 Commodore Keppel, on his mission to the State of Barbary, offered Reynolds a passage to the Mediterranean on his way to Rome, where he spent two years "with measureless con- tent," and came to the conclusion "that a relish for the higher excellences of the art is an acquired taste, which no man ever possessed without long cultivation and great labour and attention." It was there also, that studying Raphael in the chambers of the Vatican he caught a cold which left him deaf for the remainder of his life. It is from a draft of a letter from Italy at this time that fuller confirmation is added to earlier hints of the mingled worldli- ness and priggishness which through life were so very delicately blended, blended in rich colours of "cream and cheese," with the soft and easy texture of Sir Joshua Reynolds's extraordinary amiabi- lity, that amiability which made him the darling of that united aris- tocracy of England, whose vices and foibles Hogarth from the opposite side of Leicester Square was painting in a very opposite frame of mind. Hogarth and Reynolds on opposite aides of Leices- ter Square painting the opposite faces of civilization suggest a con- trast which Hogarth could have painted, and Reynolds (for Reynolds had infinite humour of a kind) would have appreciated on the part of one whom he called "an admirable artist and painter —' of common life." Yet in spite of his infinite humour, Sir Joshua was, we regret to say, in the grain a prig. It is impossible not to feel as we read that in early life he was the Lord Amberley of English Art, and that he was saved from the exaggeration of his early tendencies, partly by the ennobling and enlarging influences of his art, partly by his intercourse with a large, a masculine, and brilliant circle of men, and, but for the paradox we should add, women, who were socially above his contempt, and partly by having to work for his livelihood. At the very outset of his boyhood we find him keeping a journal and writing rules of conduct for himself, shrewd enough, but Amber- leian in the grain. Later he writes from Italy, "I remember, whenever my father discoursed on education, it was his constant practice to give this piece of advice= Never to be in too great a hurry to show yourself to the world, but lay in first of all as strong a foundation of learning and knowledge as possible." So far, very good. But observe what follows :—" This may very well bet applied to my present affairs, as by being in too great a hurry I shall perhaps ruin all, and arrive in London without reputation, and without anybody's having heard of me ; when, by staying a month longer, my fame will arrive before me, and, as Isaid before, nobody, will dare to find fault with me, since my conduct will have had the approbation of the greatest living painters." The priggishness of worldly calculation conveyed in this smooth young sentence on the part of the future knight stands in queer contrast with his never- failing sermons upon lifelong devotions to his art, upon the eleva- tions of art, the independencies of art, ths supremacies of art, the necessity of lofty and absorbing ideals in art. And this passage is no solitary instance. Throughout the whole of his intercourse, through all his quiet wit and humour, through all his amiability, through all his manifold and peculiarly native virtues, his modera- tion, his sweetness, his lasting friendships, his professional dignity, as you wander up and down his long and varied life, you never- lose the delicately-tempered and refined whiff of professional prig- gishness, highly polished, we admit, but ever present, a something which suggests that the catechism of worldly success was some- how curiously but inextricably bound up from the first in his mind with the catechism of art. It is in his portrait of himself. You see it all, in that good, sagacious, inquisitive, observant, rather mediocre face, the face of the pious greengrocer translated into art, and wanting nothing but a glorified pinafore.
But the glorified greengrocer translated into art was a very great artist, the intimate friend and associate of Burke, and Johnson, and Goldsmith, one might almost say the friend and loving painter of all England. No doubt, too, the lovingness of the man had a large share in the success of his portraits. He saw and loved the gentle, graceful, and lovely side of society. His early aspiration after idealism and his early residence in Rome enabled him to escape from the hardness of his predecessors, and to give the rein to his own naturally amiable tendency. His tendency, again, to reproduce the loving and lovely aide of society reacted upon his success, and his singular knack of catching those attitudes and indefinable characteristics peculiar to each sitter redeemed his gentleness from mawkishness or flattery. Perhaps it may be Affirmed that the mass of mankind, except at particular intervals, will always be moved by the loving more than by the hating side of art, and the relative popularity of Hogarth and Reynolds in their lifetime exactly illustrates the proposi- tion. Yet Sir Joshua Reynolds was a humourist too, only his humour had gradually been softened down under the encroachment of the opposite side of his nature into just that quantum which enabled him to seize and retain the " characteristic " elements of each person. His imaginary dialogues between Johnson and him- self and between Johnson and Gibbon on the subject of Garrick's merits, whom Johnson would allow none to praise or blame but himself, are models of delicate satire and subtle perception of character. Reynolds delighted in the drama, and had he tried would, we think, have written excellent comedies of character. But though he appreciated llogarth, the poignancy of Hogarth's nature and the flight and swoop of his satire were as far beyond Reynolds as the flight of a vulture beyond that of a dove.
The two very considerable, certainly not overgrown, volumes which Mr. Tom Taylor has published, in continuance and ampli- fication of the late Mr. Leslie's biography, interrupted by. death, contain materials of singular value and most discursive interest. After Mr. Leslie's death Mr. Taylor was asked by Mr. Murray to take up and complete Mr. Leslie s fragments. Leslie's aim had been. to " rehabilitate " Sir Joshua and disperse Allan Cunning- ham's charges, and he left no corner he could ransack for the purpose untouched. The consequence was that a vast variety of materials have been brought to light, which Mr. Taylor has still further heaped up. One feature alone stamps these volumes with a value of their own. They contain full lists, year by year, of Sir Joshua's sitters, greatly enlarged beyond what was known by the use in full of the pocket-books and note-books, recently made much more complete by the discovery of missing volumes. The value of these lists may be inferred from the fact that they have alpeady led to the discovery by unconscious owners of several of Sir Joshua Reynolds's pictures. They are accompanied, moreover, by an immense number of explanatory notes giving the history of each sitter. From this it will be evident that the Plutarchian method of biography which results in the sculpture of a definite figure is not, nor could it have been, the method employed by Mr. Tom Taylor. The only mistake is in the title. Ilis work should rather be called Encyclopzdia Reynoldsiana.
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