Joshua Reynolds
Pre-reading
Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792) was a portrait painter and aesthetician who dominated English artistic life in the middle and late 18th century. He promoted the “Grand Style” in painting which depended on idealization of the imperfect. He completed over 3000 works of art, including a few preliminary sketches. With the founding of the Royal Academy of Art in 1768, Reynolds was elected its first president, a position he held until the end of his life. He was knighted by King George Ⅲ in 1769.
Sir Joshua Reynolds was also an eloquent writer and a close friend of Samuel Johnson. His Discourses, a series of lectures delivered at the Academy between 1769 and 1790, are remembered for their sensitivity and perception.
This essay (originally untitled) first appeared in Johnson’s The Idler (1759).
Prompts for Your Reading
1.What do you imagine is the author’s idea of beauty?
2.How can we determine what is beautiful?
3.How do we develop the ability to distinguish beauty from deformity?
4.What do a Naturalist and a Painter have in common?
5.What role does habit and custom play according to the author?
6.What is the point of the example of a swan and a dove?
7.How does the author convey his idea of beauty to the reader effectively?
8.How does the author define Beauty in the passage?
9.What is Paragraph 13 about?
10.Is there a criterion for beauty? Is beauty subjective or objective?
[1] Discoursing in my last letter on the different practice of the Italian and Dutch Painters, I observed that “the Italian Painter attends only to the invariable, the great, and general ideas, which are fixed and inherent in universal nature.”
[2] I was led into the subject of this letter by endeavoring to fix the original cause of this conduct of the Italian Masters. If it can be proved that by this choice they selected the most beautiful part of the creation, it will show how much their principles are founded on reason, and, at the same time, discover the origin of our ideas of beauty.