Date: About 1775–6
Materials: Oil on canvas
Measurements: 91 x 70.9 cm
Inv. no. P36
Oldfield Bowles (1739–1810) was an Oxfordshire landowner and friend of Reynolds. He was also an accomplished amateur musician and artist, who had been tutored by the Welsh landscape painter Thomas Jones (1742–1803).
When deciding on an artist to paint a portrait of his daughter, Jane, Bowles was torn between Reynolds and George Romney (1734–1802). However, the influential art patron Sir George Beaumont (1753–1827) persuaded Bowles, who was apparently concerned with Reynolds’s use of unstable paint pigments, to award Reynolds the commission, advising that ‘even a faded picture from Reynolds will be the finest thing you have’.
To gauge how the artist and his potential sitter would get on, Reynolds was invited to meet Jane over dinner. After playing with Jane, Reynolds seemingly won the girl’s confidence, so much so that the next day she sat for the artist in his studio with a ‘face full of glee’.
Reynolds succeeded in capturing a tender likeness of the girl. It shows Jane kneeling on the ground while embracing her pet spaniel, both sitters looking out beyond the canvas towards the viewer. The girl’s wide eyes have been given a liveliness with small, white catch lights. Layers of blue-grey underpaint show through Jane’s face, casting realistic shadows around her mouth, nose and eyes, while hatched lines model the unlit side of her face.
Her shot-silk overskirt, trimmed in gold, has been created by thickly applying white paint to the canvas. Though not of a type typically worn by children during this period, the dress recalls those seen in paintings by Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669). With great realism, Reynolds has depicted the pearlescent sheen of the overskirt using a combination of blue and pink tones, a technique frequently used by the Italian old masters.
A woodland setting forms the background to the painting. Reynolds modelled the dense foliage using layers of thick yellow paint and various layers of brown-coloured translucent glazes, much like he did to create the wooded setting in his portrait of Nelly O’Brien (died 1768). The shaft of light that beams between the trees on the right side of the canvas is made up of several strokes of yellow paint dragged across the surface of the painting.
A layer of beeswax has been applied to the surface of the painting, which Reynolds might have used to give the work a soft but polished appearance. Unlike many of the artist’s other paintings, the pigments in this work have remained relatively stable and retained their colour.
The 4th Marquess of Hertford (1800–1870) bought the portrait at the sale of Jane Bowles’s brother in 1850, where it was described as ‘the celebrated picture of a little girl with a spaniel’. After acquiring the portrait, Hertford lent it to the Art Treasures Exhibition in Manchester in 1857, where it was among the most popular works on display.
Text adapted from Davis, L., 'Miss Jane Bowles', in Davis, L., and M. Hallett, Joshua Reynolds. Experiments in Paint, London, 2015, no. 7.