Joshua Reynolds is celebrated for being one of the greatest portraitists of the 18th century, and his work is the pride of galleries and museums across the world. He was recognised, even during his lifetime, for his extraordinary skill, as well as his capacity for experimentation. Through unique combinations of pigments, oils, varnishes and glazes, Reynolds looked to achieve new effects of colour, tone and depth to capture the pictorial qualities he so admired in the work of the old masters and his rivals. Reynolds’s pioneering approach, and the unstable materials it sometimes produced, has also attracted criticism, with contemporary commentors remarking on the fading and discolouration visible on portraits within a few short years of their completion.
More recently, a more sustained exploration of Reynolds’s paintings by conservators and scholars has prompted a greater understanding of his materials and techniques, as well as the nature of his experiments. As part of this more widespread reassessment of his work, the Wallace Collection, which has a particularly fine holding of Reynolds’s work, launched the Reynolds Research Project in 2010. With the generous support of the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, and in partnership with the National Gallery and in collaboration with the Yale Center for British Art, work was undertaken to conserve the museum’s portraits to improve the visual appreciation for future generations and to investigate the ways in which they were painted.
The purpose of a milestone exhibition and accompanying catalogue, Joshua Reynolds: Experiments in Paint, 2015, was to share the discoveries of the project and to reveal Reynolds’s complex and experimental engagement with painterly materials over the course of his long career. A series of thematic groupings of works from the collection with temporary loans allowed the curators to explore the development of Reynolds’s images from both a technical and art historical viewpoint.
As well as exploring his experimentation with materials, the project also revealed the innovative ways in which Reynolds he collaborated with his patrons; played with the conventions of genre, composition and pose; engaged with the work of other artists; and organised the submission and display of his work at exhibitions. The commissioning and collecting of Reynolds’s work, specifically in the context of the founders of the Wallace Collection (the Seymour-Conway family), was examined, too. These findings, many of which are explored in this dedicated online resource, are intended to encourage us to look at the work of Reynolds with fresh eyes.
Text adapted from Davis, L., and M. Hallett, 'Introduction: The Experimentalist', in Davis, L., and M. Hallett, Joshua Reynolds. Experiments in Paint, London, 2015, pp. 10–17.