Art: Mixing Grandeur and Tattiness

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When Sir Joshua Reynolds died, wrote the man who most disliked him, the poet and engraver William Blake, "All Nature was degraded;/ The King drop'd a tear into the Queen's Ear,/ And all his Pictures faded."

The factual truth of this can be assessed by anyone who visits the Reynolds retrospective now running at London's Royal Academy. Reynolds' paintings have long since faded, mimicking his reputation. "Sir Sploshua," as others called him for his generous and Rubenesque handling of wet paint surfaces, had an imp of fakery lodged in his breast. He was determined to produce, for his clientele of the great, the tone and mellowed appearance of European seicento art. To this end he would whip up weird mayonnaises of wax, turps, asphaltum, eggs, resin and oil. "Varnished three times with different varnishes, and egged twice, oiled twice, and waxed twice, and sized--perhaps in 24 hours!" exclaimed a fellow artist, Benjamin Haydon.

It was not unknown for the face to fall off a Reynolds portrait if it was shaken. Obsessed with technique, he was said to have scraped patches off his own Titian and Rubens, and was known to have destroyed a Watteau, in search of the "secrets" of the old masters. But his own paintings cooked themselves down to blistered wrecks, sometimes within the lifetime of the sitters. An elderly Irish rake, the Earl of Drogheda, returned to his native land after 30 years abroad, with a shattered constitution. He found that his youthful portrait by Reynolds was even more poxed, corrupt and wrinkled than he had become. One might say it is to Joshua Reynolds, rather than Oscar Wilde, that / the portrait of Dorian Gray owes its existence.