Book Review: Reynolds - Portraiture in Action

Reynolds: Portraiture in Actionby Mark HallettYale University Press, 2014Mark Hallett's stunning new book, Reynolds: Portraiture in Action, focuses not only on the great Georgian painter Joshua Reynolds but on his most famous kind of work, the portraits which have granted him his immortality and which one of his most famous sitters, Samuel Johnson, praised for "diffusing friendship, renewing tenderness, quickening the affections of the absent, and continuing the presence of the dead."Hallett is director of studies at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, and he brings to his enormous book (gorgeously produced by Yale University Press) an encyclopedic knowledge of the artistic atmosphere Reynolds breathed, from unsigned popular street art of his day to the works of his great predecessors like William Kent and later contemporaries like Sir Thomas Lawrence (the inclusion of some of the latter's paintings being a bit of a risk, since Lawrence at his best is handily better than Reynolds at his best). Hallett has amassed an all-encompassing collection of images in these pages, and he's a dutiful describer of their content - if a generous one, as in the case of Reynolds's magnificent, hysterically ridiculous martial portrait George, the tubby Prince of Wales:

The huge canvas, nearly eight feet high by nine feet wide, depicts the prince in a shadowed, autumnal landscape, frame by thunderous clouds and caught in the light of a low, glimmering sun. He stands next to [a] powerful grey horse ... whose mane and tail billow in the wind and whose reins the prince grasps with a gloved left hand. Meanwhile, his right hand brandishes an unsheathed sword, and his head looks to one side; it is as if he is twisting around to face an enemy or gazing out over a distant field of conflict.

When not trying to please myopic Hanoverians, Reynolds could be understatedly brilliant, as in his paintings of the so-called "Streatham Worthies" like Edmund Burke, and about one of the artist's most arresting portraits, that of Captain Cook's famed naturalist Joseph Banks, Hallett rightly observes that it "fuses the image of the seated man of letters with that of the man of action" and then seamlessly elaborates:

The portrait fuses the details of the scholarly interior found in Reynolds's earlier literary portraits - note the desk the books, the papers, the quill, even the familiar pilaster and bare stone wall - with an evocative imagery of maritime passage. Reynolds carves out a rectangle from the wall and paints in a view of a distant, empty seascape. In an echo of Hogarth's famous portrait of Thomas Coram he also includes a globe displaying the oceans that Banks had become so famous for traversing. Overlapping the windowsill and spinning metaphorically between the secluded, gentlemanly space of the study and the far more extended space of the ocean, it becomes an eloquent symbol of Banks's dual role as a deskbound scholar and an adventurous naturalist.

Reynold: Portraiture in Action abounds in such knowledgeable guidance, and Hallett's deeper sociological observations are generally just as sharp. This is the most impressive and scholarly big art book on Reynolds since the beautiful catalogue that accompanied the Royal Academy of Arts exhibit way back in 1986; it's a necessity for the connoisseurs whose ranks Reynolds was so avid to join.