Joshua Reynolds ran a portrait factory and still made masterpieces
In 2023, Joshua Reynolds's Portrait of Omai sold for 50 million pounds, more than anyone had ever paid for an eighteenth-century picture. The painter behind it ran a busy London studio that turned out over 2,000 works, led the Royal Academy from its start, and carried an ear trumpet after a Roman cold.
Born in Plympton, Devon, on 16 July 1723, the third son of a grammar school master, Reynolds owed an early debt to his older sister Mary, who loved drawing and paid half the 60 pound fee for his apprenticeship to the portraitist Thomas Hudson in 1740. He left Hudson by 1743. In 1749 Commodore Augustus Keppel took him aboard HMS Centurion to the Mediterranean, and he spent two years in Rome studying the Old Masters, absorbing the idealising Grand Style and famously declining to study with Pompeo Batoni.
Back in London from 1753, he rose fast. During the late 1750s social season he saw five or six sitters a day, an hour each, and by 1761 a full-length portrait cost 80 guineas. Assistants, above all Giuseppe Marchi, and a specialist drapery painter handled much of the clothing. Reynolds also borrowed poses from earlier artists, a habit Nathaniel Hone lampooned in a 1775 painting called The Conjuror.
Sociable and bookish, he counted Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke, Oliver Goldsmith and David Garrick among his friends, and in 1764 he gathered them into The Club, which met for Monday suppers that ran past midnight. In 1768 the newly founded Royal Academy of Arts chose him as its first president, and George III knighted him the following year, making him only the second English artist so honoured. His Discourses, lectures given there between 1769 and 1790, argued that invention mostly recombines images stored in memory.
Not everyone admired him; William Blake attacked those lectures in scathing notes. Turner, on the other hand, asked to be buried beside him. Later prices keep climbing: Lady Worsley fetched 25 million pounds in 2025, the same year Mrs. Lloyd passed to the National Trust in lieu of 17.5 million pounds of tax. Reynolds died on 23 February 1792.
Source: Joshua Reynolds
