Nicholas Penny

Today it is conventional to praise portrait painters for their psychological penetration. But in most cases Reynolds had no prior knowledge of the character of his sitters.

Sir Joshua Reynolds is remembered as a portraitist rather than a painter of heroic or poetic subjects, and modern critics tend to agree with Samuel Johnson who 'grieved' that his friend should 'transfer to heroes and to goddesses, to empty splendor and to airy fiction, that art, which is now employed in diffusing friendship, and renewing tenderness, in quickening the affections of the absent, and continuing the presence of dead'. This, however, is a partial, even a sentimental, characterization of Reynold's portraiture.