Mixing Grandeur and Tattiness

By ROBERT HUGHES

When Sir Joshua Reynolds died, wrote the man who most disliked him, the poet and engraver William Blake, "All Nature was degraded;/ The King drop'd a tear into the Queen's Ear,/ And all his Pictures faded."

The factual truth of this can be assessed by anyone who visits the Reynolds retrospective now running at London's Royal Academy. Reynolds' paintings have long since faded, mimicking his reputation. "Sir Sploshua," as others called him for his generous and Rubenesque handling of wet paint surfaces, had an imp of fakery lodged in his breast. He was determined to produce, for his clientele of the great, the tone and mellowed appearance of European seicento art. To this end he would whip up weird mayonnaises of wax, turps, asphaltum, eggs, resin and oil. "Varnished three times with different varnishes, and egged twice, oiled twice, and waxed twice, and sized--perhaps in 24 hours!" exclaimed a fellow artist, Benjamin Haydon.

It was not unknown for the face to fall off a Reynolds portrait if it was shaken. Obsessed with technique, he was said to have scraped patches off his own Titian and Rubens, and was known to have destroyed a Watteau, in search of the "secrets" of the old masters. But his own paintings cooked themselves down to blistered wrecks, sometimes within the lifetime of the sitters. An elderly Irish rake, the Earl of Drogheda, returned to his native land after 30 years abroad, with a shattered constitution. He found that his youthful portrait by Reynolds was even more poxed, corrupt and wrinkled than he had become. One might say it is to Joshua Reynolds, rather than Oscar Wilde, that / the portrait of Dorian Gray owes its existence.

Yet Reynolds' achievement was very considerable. Not only did he change the look of English portraiture, but his career, which spanned most of the 18th century (he was born in 1723 and died, all but speechless from laudanum, in 1792), transformed the sociology of English art. Before him, most portraits of the noble and great were done by imported European masters, of whom the greatest was Sir Anthony Van Dyck. Reynolds was the first Englishman to practice the Grand Manner successfully, with the full range of reference to earlier art, from Roman portrait busts to Michelangelo, Titian and Rubens. Once his career got going, which happened almost as soon as he got back from a two-year sojourn in Italy and opened a studio in London in 1753, he was flooded with commissions. As a physiognomist of power, celebrity, rank and beauty, he was as celebrated in Georgian England as Rubens had been in baroque Europe. Everyone who was anyone, from George III to Omai (the first Tahitian to visit London), posed for Reynolds, as did a miscellany of less famous friends, actresses and risen whores. Some of them also posed for Gainsborough and Romney, but it was Reynolds who defined the role of official painter to the nobility, gentry and intelligentsia. This role was summed up in his position as first president of the Royal Academy. Founded in 1768, the academy grew out of the ambition of English painters and connoisseurs to shake off the air of menial trade that had always clung to painting on their side of the Channel. Under royal patronage, they would permanently distinguish themselves from the mere mechanics of art--the etchers and engravers, the coach painters and vernacular artists. They would charge in guineas and implant the gusto grande in England: like European masters, they would be gentlemen. Above all, they would rise beyond mere pragmatism into theory. "The beauty of which we are in quest," declared Reynolds in one of his celebrated Discourses to the academy's members and students, "is general and intellectual; it is an idea that subsists only in the mind; the sight never beheld it." What he sought was a platonic essence, part of a line of idealizations descended from Michelangelo and the Greeks, not something to be grasped by English terriers like Hogarth. One did not find it in Gin Alley or Beer Lane. It would emanate from Burlington House, over whose courtyard Sir Joshua still presides with his bronze brush, bronze palette and bronze knee % breeches, flicking at a "general and intellectual" canvas that hovers invisibly in the air of Piccadilly.

The first Reynolds retrospective ever held is a solid, if not uniformly impressive, affair: more than 160 paintings, drawings and prints, plus all manner of related material that ranges from ferocious contemporary satires on Reynolds and his sitters to the cast of a hanged and flayed smuggler. Its catalog essays, by Art Historians Robert Rosenblum, Nicholas Penny and M. Kirby Talley Jr., are excellent. Its reception by English critics has been lukewarm. Sir Joshua remains hard to love--an exalted figure who was not quite exalted enough, whose output, like some of the English country houses it adorned, is a curious mixture of grandeur and tattiness, of overwrought declamation and lovely episodes of truthful "natural" vision.

With Reynolds, the grandest is not necessarily the best at all, and this is especially true of his attempts at history and myth: the most ambitious of these, a poached and blackened pastiche of Rembrandt depicting the infant Hercules throttling a snake, was thought highly sublime by Reynolds' contemporaries but looks like awkward fustian today. It seems not wholly unfair that the stout baby should have been used by a Victorian advertiser to promote something called Woodward's Gripe Water.

When Reynolds depicted high literary tragedy, such as his scene from Dante of Count Hugolino and His Children in the Dungeon, he produced bathos. The count, on realizing that he is doomed to eat his offspring or starve, wears the peevish look of one who would have preferred fettuccine. And despite a cast-iron skill of conception and many felicities of touch, Reynolds' big, official portraits, seen en masse, have something tedious about them. One would cheerfully exchange a wall or two of this stilted and fluent presentation of the social mask for a few square feet of Gainsborough.

Still, there are exceptions. The finest of them is a monumental portrait of the Marlborough family, exhibited for the first time since 1888, which locks eight figures and three dogs together in an arrangement as varied yet coherent as anything in portraiture since 16th century Venice: a composition webbed by subtly arranged linkages of expression, gesture and pose. Due respect is given to both parental power and childish playfulness; it is, in short, a painting of people and not just a genealogical diagram.

Today, one is apt to like Reynolds less for his formal declamations than for the intimate portraits of people in his London circle. Reynolds' appetite for grandeur was savagely guyed by English cartoonists of the day; there is a hilarious coda to the exhibit, showing how the vipers of the popular prints treated the Royal Academy, its patrons and the values they claimed to embody. But how agreeable he was with his coat off ! Sir Joshua's heads and half- lengths of writers and actors did for the cultural life of Georgian London what Nadar's photographs, a century later, would do for Paris.

Reynolds made the canonical like nesses of James Boswell, pink and observant, of David Garrick, the actor-manager, and his star tragic actress Sarah Siddons, of Laurence Sterne, the Irish prebendary who wrote Tristram Shandy, smiling like a quizzical fox, of Samuel Johnson in profile at 60, like a Roman sage struggling to articulate some weighty trope, and of the same great bear in mountainous age a decade later. (Johnson, for his part, paid Reynolds a mighty compliment as the man "whom, if he should quarrel with him, he should find the most difficulty how to abuse.")

All these portraits display a degree of sympathy with character that is attenuated, if not wholly lacking, in the huge social performances. Then, of course, Reynolds painted himself: grandly, as president of the Royal Academy, alone with a bust of Michelangelo (presumably after Rembrandt's Aristotle Contemplating a Bust of Homer), but also in a fresh direct way, as in the oval Self-Portrait in Doctoral Robes. The latter, painted in the space of a few hours, captured his shrewd potato face, with the hair disordered and lips just parted in speech, above the subtle pink and vermilion of an academic gown.

Once off the pedestal, Reynolds could create memorable types. Nowhere in English art is there a sweeter, tougher demimondaine than his Mrs. Abington, reflectively sucking her thumb whilst sizing up the audience with a level look annealed by years of prostitution before her stardom as a comic actress. And it would be difficult to imagine a more sympathic portrait of a minor writer than his study of Giuseppe Baretti, shortsightedly scrutinizing a book inches from his eye with the greed of a man devouring an orange. In Reynolds' intimate portraits, the aura of classical make-believe becomes an ironical virtue (it is, after all, hard to take altogether seriously a title like Lady Sarah Bunbury Sacrificing to the Graces).

Here is little Cupid as a London linkboy, sporting demonic bat wings and an immense phallic torch to remind those in the know of the proclivities of a certain patron. And here are Reynolds' friends in the learned Society of Dilettanti, arguing about antiquities and knocking back the vintage claret, while Sir William Hamilton points to an engraving of one of his own Greek vases and Mr. John Taylor holds up a lady's garter. Peering into this lost world--reprehensible, no doubt, for its elitism, sexism, amateurism and other social vices, yet not without its allure--one realizes what Sir Sploshua's friend Sir George Beaumont meant when he swept aside the doubts of an uncertain client: "No matter, take the chance; even a faded picture from Reynolds will be the finest thing you can have."