Transcribed from the 1901 Cassell and Company edition ,email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk. Proofing by David, Dawn Smith, Uzma,Jane Foster, Juliana Rew, Marie Rhoden and Jo Osment.
It is a happy memory that associates the foundation of our RoyalAcademy with the delivery of these inaugural discourses by Sir JoshuaReynolds, on the opening of the schools, and at the first annual meetingsfor the distribution of its prizes. They laid down principlesof art from the point of view of a man of genius who had made his powerfelt, and with the clear good sense which is the foundation of all workthat looks upward and may hope to live. The truths here expressedconcerning Art may, with slight adjustment of the way of thought, beapplied to Literature or to any exercise of the best powers of mindfor shaping the delights that raise us to the larger sense of life. In his separation of the utterance of whole truths from insistance uponaccidents of detail, Reynolds was right, because he guarded the expressionof his view with careful definitions of its limits. In the sameway Boileau was right, as a critic of Literature, in demanding everywheregood sense, in condemning the paste brilliants of a style then in decay,and fixing attention upon the masterly simplicity of Roman poets inthe time of Augustus. Critics by rule of thumb reduced the principlesclearly defined by Boileau to a dull convention, against which therecame in course of time a strong reaction. In like manner the teachingof Reynolds was applied by dull men to much vague and conventional generalisationin the name of dignity. Nevertheless, Reynolds taught essentialtruths of Art. The principles laid down by him will never failto give strength to the right artist, or true guidance towards the appreciationof good art, though here and there we may not wholly assent to somepassing application of them, where the difference may be great betweena fashion of thought in his time and in ours. A righteous enforcementof exact truth in our day has led many into a readiness to appreciatemore really the minute imitation of a satin dress, or a red herring,than the noblest figure in the best of Raffaelle’s cartoons. Much good should come of the diffusion of this wise little book.
Joshua Reynolds was born on the 15th of July, 1723, the son of aclergyman and schoolmaster, at Plympton in Devonshire. His bentfor Art was clear and strong from his childhood. In 1741 at theage of nineteen, he began study, and studied for two yours in Londonunder Thomas Hudson, a successful portrait painter. Then he wentback to Devonshire and painted portraits, aided for some time in hiseducation by attention to the work of William Gandy of Exeter. When twenty-six years old, in May, 1749, Reynolds was taken away byCaptain Keppel to the Mediterranean, and brought into contact with theworks of the great painters of Italy. He stayed two years in Rome,and in accordance with the principles afterwards laid down in theselectures, he refused, when in Rome, commissions for copying, and gavehis mind to minute observation of the art of the great masters by whoseworks he was surrounded. He spent two months in Florence, sixweeks in Venice, a few days in Bologna and Parma. “If,”he said, “I had never seen any of the fine works of Correggio,I should never, perhaps, have remarked in Nature the expression whichI find in one of his pieces; or if I had remarked it, I might have thoughtit too difficult, or perhaps impossible to execute.”
In 1753 Reynolds came back to England, and stayed three months inDevonshire before setting up a studio in London, in St. Martin’sLane, which was then an artists’ quarter. His success wasrapid. In 1755 he had one hundred and twenty-five sitters. Samuel John