the Royal Academy. He was at the time the most respected painter in
England, and he also enjoyed a wide reputation as a theorist on art.
Reynolds moved with ease among the great men of his day. Mrs Siddons
remarks in her memoirs: "...At his house were assembled all the good, the
wise, the talented, the rank and fashion of the age."
The painting is in fact a brilliantly successful synthe-sis of images
and ideas from a wide variety of sources.
The basic notion of representing Mrs Siddons in the guise of the
Tragic Muse may well have been suggested to Reynolds by a poem honouring
the actress and published early in 1783. The verses themselves are not
distinguished, but the title and the poet's initial image of Mrs Siddons
enthroned as Melpomene, the muse of tragedy, may have lodged in Reynolds's
memory and given the initial direction to his thinking about the portrait.
It has long been recognized that in the basic organiza-tion of the
picture Reynolds had Michelangelo's prophets and sybils of the Sistine
ceiling in mind. Mrs Siddons's pose'recalls that of Isaiah, and of the
two attendant figures the one on the left is very closely modelled on the
simi-larly placed companion of the prophet Jeremiah.
Reynolds's attitude toward this sort of borrowing from the works of
other artists may seem a little strange to us today. He thought that great
works of art should serve as a school to the students at the Royal
Academy: "He, who borrows an idea from an ancient, or even from a modern
artist not his contemporary, and so accommodates his own work, that it
makes a part of it, with no seam or joining appearing, can hardly be
charged with plagiarism: poets practise this kind of borrowing, without
reserve. But an artist should not be content with this only; he should
enter into a competition with his original, and endeavour to improve what
he is appropriating to his own work. Such imitation is ... a perpetual
exercise of the mind, a continual invention." From this point of view "The
Tragia Muse" is a perfect illustration of Reynolds;s advice to the
student.
If the arrangement of the figures in the portrait of Mrs Siddons
suggests Michelangelo, other aspects of the painting, particularly the
colour, the heavy shadow effects, and the actual application of the paint,
are totally unlike the work of Michelangelo and suggest instead the
paintings of Rembrandt.
But the amazing thing is that the finished product is in no sense a
pastiche. The disparate elements have all been transformed through
Reynolds's own visual imagination and have emerged as a unit in which the
relationship of all the parts to one another seems not only correct but
inevitable. This in itself is an achievement commanding our admiration.
In "The Tragic Muse" Reynolds achieved an air of grandeur and dignity
which he and his contemporaries regarded as a prime objective of art and
which no other portrait of the day embodied so successfully.
5.3) George Romney (1734-1802)
Romney is best known to the general public by facile portraits of
women and children and by his many studies of Lady Hamilton, whom he
delighted to portray in various historical roles, these are not however his
best works. His visit to Italy at a time when New Classical movement was
gaming ground made a lasting impression on him and some of his portrait
groups, e. g. "The Gower Children", 1776, are composed with classical
statuary in mind, particularly in the treatment of the draperies. He
painted a number of impressive male portraits., and some fashionable groups
of great elegance, e. g. "Sir Cristopher and Lady Sykes", 1786. His output
was large,,but he never exhibited at the Royal Academy.
Romney was of an imaginative, introspective, and nervous temperament.
He was attracted to literary circles and William Hayley and William Cowper
were among his friends. He had aspirations to literary subjects in the
Grand Manner, and, painted for Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery. His sepia
drawings, mostly designs for literary and historical subjects which he
never carried put, were highly prized; there is a large collection of them
in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.
5.4) Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788)
When Gainsborough made his often-quoted remark about Reynolds, "Damn
him, how various he is", he was glancing, we may suppose, at the peculiar
skill by which his great rival ran the whole gamut of portrait-painting,
from "mere heads" to the most elaborate poetic and allegorical fantasies.
Gainsborough himself had no such variety, but painted his sitters,
commonly, in their habit as they lived. Yet, in a larger sense, he was far
more va-rious than Reynolds. He excelled in two distinct branches of the
art, portraiture and landscape, and revealed an un-equalled success in
combining the two -- that is, in adjusting the human figure to a background
of natural scenery. Moreover, he excelled in conversation pieces, animal
painting, seascapes, genre and even still life. Such was his peculiar
variety.
Gainsborough's personality was also more vivid and various than that of Sir
Joshua. He was excitable, easily moved to wrath and as readily appeased,
generous and friendly with all who loved music and animals and the open
air. He had not Reynolds's gift of suffering fools gladly. Although he
painted at court, he was not a courtly person, but preferred to associate
with musicians, simple folk, and, on occasion, with cottagers. His most
engaging pictures are those of persons with whom he was intimate or at
ease. His grand sitters seem a little glacial, for all the perfection of
the painter's technique, as though a pane of glass were between them and
the artist.
The methods of the two painters are sufficiently indicated by their
respective treatment of Mrs Siddons. Reynolds, when the portrait was
finished, signed his name along the edge of her robe, in order to send his
name "down to posterity on the hem of her garment". Gainsborough made no
attempt, as he had no wish, to record the art of "Queen Sarah"; but he was
interested in the woman as she rustled into his studio in her blue and
white silk dress. Her hat, muff and fur delighted him, and he proceeded to
paint her as though she were paying him a call. As an actress, she was one
of those sitters with whom he could be informal; and while drawing her
striking profile, he is said to have remarked, "Damn it, madam, there is no
end to your nose." The man who made such a remark was, clearly, no
courtier, but a brusque and friendly being, concerned to rid his sitter of
all sense of restraint. For a painter's studio is to the sitter a nerve-
racking place.
Gainsborough had from the first shown peculiar skill in representing
his sitters as out-of-doors, and thus uniting portraiture with landscape.
In his youth he had painted a portrait of Mr and Mrs Andrews sitting in a
wheat-fieM - a lovely picture, fresh as the dew of morning, in which
Gainsborough's two major interests seem almost equally balanced; and at the
close of his career his love of scenery sometimes prevailed over his
interest in human beings, and resulted not so much in a portrait as in a
picture of a garden or a park, animated by gallant men and gracious women.
The tendency to prefer the scenery to the persons animating it reaches a
climax in the famous canvas "Ladies Walking in the Mall". It is a view of
the central avenue of the Mall, near Gainsborough's residence, behind
Carlton House. The identity of the fashionable ladies taking an afternoon
stroll in the park is happily ignored. The rustling of the foliage is
echoed, as it were, in the shimmer of the ladies' gowns, so that Horace
Walpole wrote of the picture that it was "all-a-flutter, like a lady's
fan". It has the delicate grace of Lancret or Pater, and betrays the
painter's ingenious escape from his studio to the greenest retreat.
Joshua Reynolds
on the Art of Thomas Gainsborough
"Whether he most excelled in portraits, landscapes or fancy-pictures,
it is difficult to determine [...] This excel-lence was his own, the
result of his particular observation and taste; for this he was certainly
not indebted [...] to any School; for his grace was not academical, or
antique, but selected by himself from the great school of nature [...]
[...] The peculiarity of his manner or style, or we may call it - his
language in which he expressed his ideas, has been considered by many, as
his greatest defect. But... whether this peculiarity was a defect or not,
intermixed, as it was, with great beauties, of some of which it was
probably the cause, it becomes a proper subject of criticism and enquiry to
a painter. [...]
[...] It is certain, that all those odd scratches and marks which, on
a close examination, are so observable in Gainsborough's pictures; ... this
chaos, this uncouth and shape-less appearance, by a kind of magic, at a
certain distance assumes form, and all the parts seem to drop into their
proper places; so that we can hardly refuse acknowledging the full effect
of diligence, under the appearance of chance and hasty negligence. [...]
[...] It must be allowed, that the hatching manner of Gainsborough
did very much contribute to the lightness of effect which is so eminent a
beauty in his pictures." [...]
6) Eighteenth Century Lanscape
By the time of Hogarth's death in 1764, a new genera-tion had already
