Life and Times of Sir Joshua Reynolds: With Notices of Some of His Contemporaries

Commenced by CHARLES ROBERT LESLIE, R. A. Continued and concluded by TOM TAYLOR, M. A. London: John Murray. 2 vols. 8vo.

“ WHEN, in 1S32,” writes C. R. Leslie, “Constable exhibited his ‘Opening of Waterloo Bridge,’ it was placed in the school of painting, — one of the small rooms in Somerset House. A sea-piece, by Turner, was next to it, — a gray picture, beautiful and true, but with no positive color in any part of it. Constable’s ‘Waterloo’ seemed as if painted with liquid gold and silver, and Turner came several times into the room while he was heightening with vermilion and lake the decorations and flags of the city barges. Turner stood behind him, looking from the ‘Waterloo’ to his own picture, and at last brought his palette from the great room where he was touching another picture, and, putting a round daub of red lead, somewhat bigger than a shilling, on his gray sea, went away without saying a word. The intensity of the red lead, made more vivid by the coolness of his picture, caused even the vermilion and lake of Constable to look weak. I came into the room just as Turner left it. ' He has been here,’ said Constable, ‘and fired a gun.’ ”

Twenty years ago the erratic life of Haydon the artist was dashed suddenly and violently out by his own hand. Men brought the cold light of their judgment then, and overspread his character, forgetful of the fires of his genius ; but Mr. Tom Taylor remembered the burning spirit, memorable to the soul of art, and he published two volumes containing Haydon’s autobiography and journals, which have set a seal upon his memory, and lead us to thank the man who has done for Haydon what Turner did for his own picture,—fired a gun.

Since Haydon’s Autobiography was published, Mr. Taylor has not been idle. Some of the purest and most popular plays now upon the stage we owe to his hand. The face of the blasé theatre-goer shines when his play is announced for the evening; and even the long-visaged critic, fond of talking of the décadence of the modern stage, has been known to appear punctually in his seat when Tom Taylor’s play was to lead off the performance.

The days of Burton have passed, and the echoes of roof-splitting laughter he excited have died away; but while the remembrance of “lovely things” remains with us, those who were fortunate enough to have seen Mr. Taylor’s play of “ Helping Hands,” as performed at Burton’s Theatre in New York, will be sure never to forget it.

We should be glad, if space permitted, to speak of Mr. Taylor in the several branches of literature wherein he has become distinguished ; but it is chiefly with him as a biographer, and principally with one biography, we are concerned here.

Six years ago, Leslie’s “ Biographical Recollections ” were given to the world by the hand of the same editor. There are few books move delightful of this kind in our language ; and no small share of the interest results from the conscientious work Mr. Taylor has put into the study of Mr. Leslie’s pictures, and his recognition of him as distinctively a literary painter, possessing a kindly brotherhood to Washington Irving in the subtile humor he loved to depict.

We remember having the good fortune once to meet Mr. Taylor, while he was preparing this book, and being impressed with the idea that he had committed Mr. Leslie’s paintings to memory, as one of the necessary preliminaries in order to do justice to his subject. lie had that day returned from a pilgrimage to one of the pictures, and was able to inform the artists who were present with regard to the smallest accessory. We fancied, had painting, and not penning, been his forte, he could have reproduced the picture for us on the spot, could we, at the same time, have transformed the table-cloth into a canvas.

In the Preface to the Recollections of Leslie, we are told that the reason his autobiography ends abruptly was not because of Mr. Leslie’s failing health, “but because all the time he could spare from painting was, during the last year of his life, occupied by him in writing the Life of Sir Joshua Reynolds, at which he worked hard even a month before his death.” When the Leslie papers were put into Mr. Taylor’s hands, this Life, then in a fragmentary condition, being hardly more than memoranda, for the most part, also came into his possession. And it having been bis “ lot,” as be has elsewhere said, to have the materials for two artistic biographies already intrusted to his care, he must have accepted the third, thus silently bestowed, as the especial legacy of his friend.

Therefore, by education and by accident, ( if we may choose to consider it such,) setting aside Mr. Taylor’s natural ability for the labor, he found himself pre-eminently elected to complete and issue the “ Life and Times of Sir Joshua Reynolds.” The request of Mr. Murray, the publisher, appears, however, to have spurred him to the actual acceptance of the work. Some idea of these volumes, with their varied interest of life and art, maybe briefly conveyed by quoting from the Preface, where Mr. Taylor writes : —

“The life of a painter, more than most men, as a rule, derives its interest from his work and from the people he paints. When his sitters are the chief men and women of his time, for beauty, genius, rank, power, wit, goodness, or even fashion and folly, this interest is heightened. It culminates when the painter is the equal and honored associate of his sitters. All these conditions concur in the case of Reynolds. It is impossible to write a Life and Times of the painter without passing in review — hasty and brief as it must be — the great facts of politics, literature, and manners during his busy life, which touched, often very closely, the chief actors in a drama taking in the most stirring events of the last century, and containing the germs of many things that have materially operated to shape our arts, manners, and institutions.

“ By the use of these materials, I have attempted to carry out Mr. Leslie’s intention of presenting Sir Joshua in his true character, as the genial centre of a most various and brilliant society, as well as the transmitter of its chief figures to our time by his potent art.”

It is only by turning over the pages of each chapter, and observing closely the brackets wherein Mr. Taylor’s portion of the work is enclosed, that we discover how great his labor has been, and how well fulliilcd. His interpolations are flung, like the Fribourg Bridge, fine and strong, welding together opposing points, and never inserted like a wedge. A happy instance of this appears in the first volume, where Mr. Taylor says, speaking of Johnson, after the death of his mother, “ The regard of such men as Reynolds was henceforth the best comfort of that great, solitary heart; and the painter’s purse and house and pen were alike at his friend’s service.” “ For example,” Leslie continues, “in this year Reynolds wrote three papers for the ‘Idler.’ ‘ I have heard Sir Joshua say,’ observes Northcote, ‘that Johnson required them from him on a sudden emergency, and on that account he sat up the whole night to complete them in time ; and by it he was so much disordered, that it produced a vertigo in his head.’”

The story of Reynolds’s youth is a happier one than is often recorded of young artists. His father was too wise and too kind to cross the natural proclivities of the boy, although he does appear to have wavered for a moment when Joshua declared he “ had rather be an apothecary than an ordinary painter.” He was, however, early apprenticed to Hudson, the first portraitpainter of his time in England. But hardly two years had elapsed before the master saw himself eclipsed, and the two separated without great waste of love on the part of Hudson. From that moment, Reynolds’s career was decided. He put the mannerism of his former master away from his pictures when he distanced himself from his studio, and, going soon after to the Continent, devoted himself to the study of great works of art. With what vigor and faithfulness this labor was pursued, the Roman and Venetian note-books testify. “ For the studies he made from Raphael,” writes Leslie, “ he paid dearly ; for he caught so severe a cold in the chambers of the Vatican as to occasion a deafness which obligèd him to use an ear-trumpet for the remainder of his life.”

The fertility and inexhaustibility of power shown by Sir Joshua Reynolds have seldom, if ever, been surpassed in the history of Art. In the “ Catalogue Raisonnée ” of his paintings, soon to be given to the public, nearly three thousand pictures will be enumerated. Many of these were, of course, finished by his assistants, according to the fashion of the time, but the expression of the face remains to attest the master’s hand. (Unless, perchance, the head may have dropped off the canvas entirely, as happened once, when an unfortunate youth, who had borrowed one of his fine pictures to copy, was carrying it home under his arm.)

In the record for the year 1758, we are startled by the number of one hundred and fifty sitters. And although this was probably the busiest year of his life, our astonishment never wanes while observing the ceaseless industry of every moment of his career, during the seventh day as well as the other six; and this, too, in spite of a promise won from him by Dr, Johnson, when on his death-bed, that he would never use his pencil on a Sunday. But the habit of a long working life was too strong upon him, and he soon persuaded himself that it was better to have made the promise than distress a dying friend, although he did not intend to observe it strictly.

Sir Joshua possessed the high art of inciting himself to work by repeatedly soliciting the most beautiful and most interesting persons of the time to sit to him. The lovely face of Kitty Fisher was painted by him five times, and no less frequently that of the charming actress, Mrs. Abington, who was also noted for her bel esprit, and was evidently a favorite with the great painter. There are two or three pictures of Mrs. Siddons by his hand, and many of the beautiful Maria Countess Waldegrave, afterwards Duchess of Gloucester, a lock of whose “ delicate golden-brown ” hair was found by Mr. Taylor in a side-pocket of one of Sir Joshua’s note-books, — “loveliest of all, whom Reynolds seems never to have been tired of painting, nor she of sitting to him.”

Of his numerous and invaluable pictures of Dr. Johnson and Goldsmith and Admiral Keppel, it is hardly necessary to speak. Many of them are well known to us from engravings.

To a painter, this Life is of incalculable interest and value. The account of his manner of handling “the vehicles” is minute and faithful; and if, as Northcote complained, who was a pupil of Reynolds, Sir Joshua could not teach, he could only show you how he worked, — many an artist can gather from these pages what Northcote gathered by looking from palette to canvas. The descriptions of some of the paintings are rich in color, and are worthy of the highest praise.

Sir Joshua Reynolds is one of the few men of genius who have been also men of society. In his note-books for the year, sometimes the number of engagements for dinners and visits would preponderate over the number of his sitters, and sometimes the scale would be about equal. Yet the amount of the latter was always astonishingly large. Perhaps no man, through a long series of years, was more esteemed and sought by the most honorable in society than he ; while his diary, with its meagre jottings, brings before us a motley and phantasmagorial procession of the wisest and wittiest, the most beautiful and most notorious men and women of that period, who thronged his studio. We can see the bitterest political opponents passing each other upon the threshold of his painting-room, and, what was far more agreeable to Sir Joshua than having to do with these stormy petrels, we can see the worshipping knight and his lovely mistress, or the fair-cheeked children of many a lady whom he had painted, years before, in the first blossoming of her own youth.

The gentleness and natural amiability of his disposition eminently fitted him for the high social position he attained; but the fervor he felt for his work made him forget everything foreign to it until the hour arrived when he must leave his painting-room, He was fond of receiving company, especially at dinner, and his dinners were always most agreeable. He often annoyed his sister, Miss Reynolds, who presided over his household for a time, by inviting any friends who might happen into his studio in the morning to come to dine with him at night, quite forgetting that the number of seats he had provided was already filled by guests previously asked. The result was what might be expected, and it was often simply bare good fortune if everybody had enough to eat. But, “though the dinner might be careless and inelegant, and the servants awkward and too few,” the talk was always pleasant, and no invitations to dine were more eagerly accepted than his.

It was on the principle, perhaps, that “ to the feasts of the good the good come uninvited,” that Dr. Johnson made it a point to he present on these occasions, and was seldom welcomed otherwise than most cordially by Sir Joshua. On one occasion, however, when another guest was expected to converse, Sir Joshua was really vexed to find Dr. Johnson in the drawing-room, and would hardly speak to him. Miss Reynolds, who appears to have been one of the “ unappreciated and misunderstood ” women who thought she was a painter when she was not, and of whose copies Sir Joshua said, “They make other people laugh, and me cry,” became a great favorite with Dr. Johnson, who probably knew how to sympatliize with the morbid sensitiveness of the poor lady. She seems never to have tired of pouring tea for him ! He, in return, wrote doggerel verses to her over the teatray in this fashion : —