Inevitability

As you wander through the Castle Library you might pause to consider the red sofas framing the fireplace: they are really rather familiar from numerous scenes in Downton Abbey as well as being one of my favourite places to sit and read. Thus, in many ways the sofas are the epitome of Highclere’s juxtaposition of both a real and a fictional home.

Moving on through the music room you come into the drawing room. Directly opposite you, catching your eye, is a large richly coloured painting of two boys. It immediately courts your admiration and is one of several portraits in the Castle by Sir Joshua Reynolds.

With retrospect, it might seem obvious that since Reynolds was both talented and hardworking, he was bound to be successful but it is never quite that straightforward. Born in Devon three hundred years ago, Reynolds (1723 –1792) was one of twelve children, four of whom died before they were ten years old. His father, Reverend Samuel Reynolds, was a vicar and a master at the local grammar school in Plympton, a historic village near Plymouth.

Presumably money was in short supply and thus none of the family went on to further education. Joshua, however, showed great promise for drawing and art and his sister Mary, who had some success as an author, was able to frank him £60 for the pupillage fee to the portrait painter, Thomas Hudson. Later she also helped him with expenses when he travelled around Italy. The Grand Tour of Italy was an essential part of the career of every artist, absorbing the beauty and setting of art and reality as well as meeting other craftsmen.

At that time, painting was considered as a craft to be carried out by craftsmen in workshops. Pigments had to be ground by hand and one of the things students had to learn was how to judge the quality of the cakes of paint before they were ground in oil. Comprehensive knowledge and experience was needed to prepare these materials accurately and to the necessary quality and artists such as Reynolds were always searching for the secrets of the colours of the old masters such as Titian and other Venetian artists.

Reynolds continuously experimented with binding mediums – a reference to Megilp as a medium was found in Reynold’s 1767 notebook which is a mixture of gum and turpentine. He tried waxes and resins, sometimes the paint did not dry properly or sometimes it cracked. Neither he nor his peers actually knew what their predecessors used. Today we know van Eyck, for example, used a mixture of linseed and walnut oil.

The mid -18th century saw the beginnings of the industrialisation of paint manufacturing and as a result more amateurs were able to to take up painting. It became a gentlemen’s pastime rather than simply the occupation of craftsman

Who would have thought that the chance early years of his life would lead to Reynold’s achievement and reputation as one of the great British portrait artists? The historian Simon Schama said that the Reynolds ‘portrait of Omai’ is “one of the greatest things British arts has ever produced [and] one of the all-time, timeless masterpieces that painting can produce.”

Portrait of Omai

As it is for all of us, the twists and turns of fate were not obvious. The old adages of hard work and persistence certainly played their part and the time he spent in Italy left a lifelong appreciation of classical poses and compositions and the richness and depth of imagined perfect landscapes. The rest came down to his skill and eye for detail on the one hand and his affabaility and charm with clients. Reynolds brought the appeal of the past to his style but had the ability both to explore and present aspects of the subjects’ personality within his portraiture.

He became the Principal Painter in Ordinary to King George III and was knighted in 1769.