Joshua Reynolds :

Experiments in Paint
 By
Lucy Davis
Trustees of the Wallace
Collection

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, London (12 March-7 June 2015), and the result of the
four-year research project, this catalogue focuses on Reynolds's
innovative, often highly experimental approaches to the practice and
materials of painting. It investigates his radical manipulation of
pigments, oils, glazes and varnishes, and traces his experiments with
colour, tone and handling. It reveals his continual temptation to
rework and revise his pictures, illuminates his highly creative
responses to the new exhibition culture of his day and explores his
continual adaptations of the art of the Old Masters. In doing so, it
encourages us to look at the work of this famous eighteenth-century
British artist in a new and often surprising light.

Technical analysis of some of Reynolds's most important paintings

will be revelatory, and close-up photography and detailed
examination of a range of pictures - at the centre of which are the
Wallace Collection's own outstanding collection of works by the
artist - will shed light on the fascinating and ongoing process of
experimentation that spanned Reynolds's entire career.

The book situates Reynolds's practice of experimentation, of both

technique and of subject, in relation to that 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. 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.

Trustees of the Wallace Collection

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