Reynolds by S.L. Bensusan

We owe an apology to the new President whom we left standing upon the threshold of the Royal Academy, which opened its doors with a first exhibition of one hundred and thirty-six pictures! The memory of this commendable modesty should not be allowed to fade in these days when canvas stretches by the acre over the long-suffering walls of Burlington House, when artists appear not singly but in battalions and the cry is "still they come. " In April 1769 Reynolds received the honour of knighthood and this seems to have put the finishing touches to his social claims. Henceforward he painted fewer portraits; the records of 1771 credit him with a mere seventy, and though this figure may make modern men gasp, it compares but feebly with the one hundred and eighty-four that stood to the credit of an earlier year. The President increased the number of his clubs, enlarged his dining circle, became more and more dignified, mellow, gracious, and urbane, farther removed than before from the turmoil that was going on in art circles of the less successful men around him. Having all the cream he required, he was not concerned with quarrels about skimmed milk. Some of his biographers think that Romney was beginning to compete with the master, and that this competition accounts for the diminishing number of his sitters, but it is reasonable to suppose that a man who can make his own prices and is beyond the reach of want may regard seventy portraits as a very satisfactory output for one year, when he has other duties to fulfil and is by temperament a lover of the world's good things. Fortune could have given him nothing more, unless the hearing that passed in the old days of the pilgrimage to Rome had been restored, and if such a miracle could have been vouchsafed, the painter's splendid indifference to matters that annoy quick, nervous temperaments might have passed, and the latter days might have been clouded.

If wisdom at one entrance was nearly shut out, there was plenty left, as may be gathered from a study of the Discourses. Their vitality is proved by the fact that new editions are still called for, and many members of the more modern schools of painting declare that Reynolds saw some aspects of painting with twentieth-century eyes.