One of Britain's most important and influential painters, Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792) is justly celebrated for his dynamic portraiture, his poignant 'fancy pictures', his ambitious history paintings and his role as the first President of Britain's Royal Academy.
Published to accompany a major exhibition at the Wallace Collection, this catalogue provides a fresh perspective on the artist, focusing on his innovative, often highly experimental approaches to the practice and materials of painting.
Building on the many discoveries made during a four-year research project into the outstanding collection of the artist's works at the Wallace Collection, Joshua Reynolds: Experiments in Paint investigates his radical manipulation of pigments, oils, glazes and varnishes. It traces his experiments with colour, tone and handling, reveals his continual temptation to rework and revise his pictures, and illuminates his highly creative responses to the new exhibition culture of his day. It also suggests the extent to which the artist's work was founded upon a radical agenda of pictorial assemblage, in which he mixed anew the motifs, narratives and visual effects he drew from in the great art of the past. Finally, it demonstrates how Reynolds's innovations as a painter were often the product of collaboration - in part, with his assistants and his students, but, more importantly, with his patrons and subjects, with whom he continually explored the possibilities of gesture, expression, performance and role-play.
Seven essays by leading scholars, curators and conservators, situate Reynolds's practice of experimentation - of both technique and of subject - in relation to those conducted at leading societies of science and learning at the time, and specifically to Josiah Wedgwood, one of Enlightenment Britain's greatest experimentalists in the arts. Technical analysis of some of his most important paintings will be revelatory, and close-up photography and detailed entries on a range of Reynolds's pictures - at the centre of which are the Wallace Collection's own collection of works by the artist - will shed light on the fascinating and ongoing process of experimentation that spanned the Reynolds's entire career.
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