Works by Joshua Reynolds

Joshua Reynolds, the Royal Academy's first president, painted the London society of his day, often borrowing his sitters' poses from earlier art and sometimes dressing them as figures from antiquity.

Lady Sarah Bunbury Sacrificing to the Graces, of 1763–65, turns a marriage portrait into an antique rite: in loose pink robes she holds out a dish above a smoking altar under a statue of the three Graces, while a girl beside her pours from a jug. The actress Frances Abington, painted in the role of Miss Prue, is closer and less formal, leaning over a chair back with a thumb at her lips and a small dog below. Yale suggests it was a private picture, which may explain the pose.

Apprenticed to the portrait painter Thomas Hudson in 1740, he left him in 1743; in 1749 he sailed to the Mediterranean with Augustus Keppel and spent two years in Rome studying the old masters. A severe cold in Rome left him partly deaf, and in Self-Portrait as a Deaf Man, from the 1770s, he cups a hand behind his ear.

Reynolds often tried new pigments and mixtures, and in many of his portraits the pinks and reds have faded; Sarah Campbell, of 1777–78, keeps her rosy cheeks. His studio was busy: at the height of the season in the late 1750s he saw five or six sitters a day, and pupils and assistants usually painted the clothes. Yale's Elizabeth Gunning is a studio replica, probably copied by his assistants. Portraits in oil make up most of what follows, women about as often as men, with some children and several self-portraits.

Sources: Wikidata, Wikipedia, National Gallery, Yale Center for British Art, Art Institute of Chicago.