Book Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.Download Description
When the artist is once enabled to express himself with some degree of correctness, he must then endeavour to collect subjects for expression; to amass a stock of ideas, to be combined and varied as occasion may require. He is now in the second period of study, in which his business is to learn all that has hitherto been known and done. Having hitherto received instructions from a particular master, he is now to consider the art itself as his master. He must extend his capacity to more sublime and general instructions. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Depends what you're after
I personally think, that these volumes would normally appeal to an art or university library, but the average art lover could find them a tad disappointing for the price.Both volumes are huge - measuring about 12cm wide together on the bookcase; but the text volume is only text and the prints are mostly black and white.
I wouldn't attempt to knock these guys for inaccuracy.They seem to have taken a thorough and methodical approach to the whole subject with the details of each portrait carefully listed and catalogued. However, I do think it's a shame that they didn't go the extra mile and ensure that more of the reproductions were in colour.Reynolds was a superb portrait artist and I don't feel that this catalogue comes even close to really showcaseing his work.
Regarding the colour plates; in the prints volume there are 132 in colour, but a fairly random selection that I think misses a lot of his best portrait work. The rest of the prints are in black and white and listed four to a page.I was also a bit disappointed with the quality of the photography, as I've seen better prints of most of the paintings that I recognised in other publications.
So five stars for the scholarship and research - but in my opinion, for the price, only get it if you really, really love Reynolds. ... Read more

Book Description

Book Description

That Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792) became the most fashionable painter of his time was not simply due to his artistic gifts or good fortune. The art of pleasing, Richard Wendorf contends, was as much a part of Reynolds's success--in his life and in his work--as the art of painting. The author's examination of Reynolds's life and career illuminates the nature of eighteenth-century English society in relation to the enterprise of portrait-painting. Conceived as an experiment in cultural criticism, written along the fault lines that separate (but also link) art history and literary studies, Sir Joshua Reynolds: The Painter in Society explores the ways in which portrait-painting is embedded in the social fabric of a given culture as well as in the social and professional transaction between the artist and his or her subject. In addition to providing a new view of Reynolds, Wendorf's book develops a thoroughly new way of interpreting portraiture.

Wendorf takes us into Reynolds's studio to show us the artist deploying his considerable social and theatrical skills in staging his sittings as carefully orchestrated performances. The painter's difficult relationship with his sister Frances (also an artist and writer), his complicated maneuvering with patrons, the manner in which he set himself up as an artist and businessman, his highly politicized career as the first president of the Royal Academy of Arts: as each of these aspects of Reynolds's practice comes under Wendorf's scrutiny, a new picture of the painter emerges--more sharply defined and fully fleshed than the Reynolds of past portraits, and clearly delineating his capacity for provoking ambivalence among friends and colleagues, and among viewers and readers today.

Book Description
This book includes all the surviving letters of Sir Joshua Reynolds,Britain's most esteemed eighteenth-century portrait painter. Reynolds's 308 letters-almostdouble the number included in the last published edition of his letters-are accompaniedby detailed notes that illuminate the correspondence and identify the friends, familymembers, and patrons to whom he wrote.Published for the Paul Mellon Centre forStudies in British Art ... Read more

Book Description
Sir Joshua Reynolds' reputation today rests principally on his portraits, his theoretical writings on art and his role as President of the Royal Academy. Yet in his own day Reynolds' subject pictures were among the most widely discussed British paintings of the century. This is the first book to concentrate on this important aspect of Reynolds' work. Covering the period from 1760 to 1830, it shows the way in which these pictures were inextricably linked to Reynolds' aims and practices as a painter, and to the way in which he was perceived by his peers. ... Read more

Book Description
Joshua Reynolds: The Creation of Celebrity examines one of England's greatest portrait painters in the social, political, and cultural context of a century that cultivated a very modern notion of fame. This new approach to Reynolds (1723-1792) considers his life and career in terms of a conscious quest for celebrity. Reynolds surrounded himself with the most famous men and women of his time. His portraits served to create, reinforce, and advertise not only his subjects' reputations but also his own. It is, therefore, no surprise that Reynolds made no fewer than 27 self-portraits in which he purposefully perpetuated his well-crafted public image as an artist, an academic, and a knight.

Published to accompany a major Tate exhibition, this book features many of Reynolds's most famous and beautiful portraits. Sections consider the friendships Reynolds cultivated with the famous and infamous figures of his time, among them politicians, courtesans, writers, war heroes, and aristocrats. These flamboyant and influential subjects helped to promote and sustain Reynolds's distinguished career and, ultimately, to secure his enduring popularity with audiences today. AUTHOR BIO: Mark Hallett is reader in history of art at the University of York. Tim Clayton is a former research fellow at Worcester College, Oxford. Martin Postle is a Tate curator and an authority on the art of Joshua Reynolds. Stella Tillyard is the internationally acclaimed author of The Aristocrats. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Tate Gallery's description (includes no.s of ill.s)
"Joshua Reynolds: The Creation of Celebrity features many of Reynolds's most famous and beautiful portraits. Individual sections consider the friendships Reynolds cultivated with the famous and infamous figures of his time: politicians; courtesans; literary figures; war heroes; and aristocrats. These flamboyant and influential subjects helped to promote and sustain Reynolds's distinguished career and, ultimately, to secure his enduring popularity with audiences today."

296pp, 110 colour and 20 black-and-white illustrations

My view: should be in hardcover!!
... Read more

Book Description
A Journey to Flanders and Holland, first published in 1797 in the Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds, is his perceptive account of the pictures which he saw in the Austrian Netherlands, the United Provinces and the Rhineland in 1781. The Journey is here published separately for the first time, in a new edition which is also the first to include explanatory notes on the pictures mentioned by Reynolds and to illustrate all those which he discussed in any depth. Harry Mount provides an introduction which sets the Journey in its context and draws on unpublished material from Reynolds's notebooks to give insights into his critical procedures. All in all, this edition of the Journey makes an important contribution both to the history of the reception of Netherlandish art and to our understanding of the development of art theory and criticism in eighteenth-century England. ... Read more