Sir Joshua Reynolds belongs to those select few who seem to move through life with effortless ease: as the most successful British painter of the eighteenth century, known for his “suavity of deportment,” in the words of his friend Edmund Malone, he mixed with the highest in the land. As befits a member of life’s natural aristocracy, his arrival at a party, his assistant James Northcote noted, created an instant buzz, whereas “when a duke or an earl was announced, few of the people took notice. This shows us the respect and admiration which is paid to great and acknowledged talent, beyond what rank—mere rank alone—can never hope to claim.”
Reynolds had an elegant address in 47 Leicester Fields with two obelisks at the entrance and members of the royal family as neighbors. His carriage had gilt wheels and emblems of the four seasons on the sides. He was a member of all the right societies and clubs, including the circle of Dr. Johnson, which met Wednesday nights at the Turk’s Head tavern in Soho. His own table was noted for its conviviality, and its badly trained servants—“unfit to attend a company, as to steer a man of war,” as Johnson harrumphed—but with such a genial host, nobody seemed to mind.
Though outwardly serene, Reynolds was also an extremely astute operator. In his sumptuous Reynolds: Portraiture in Action, Mark Hallett traces Reynolds’s career through his portraits, demonstrating the deliberate way Reynolds built his reputation: the
