Sirr Joshua Reynolds, (born July 16, 1723, Plympton, Devon, England—died February 23, 1792, London), portrait painter and aesthetician who dominated English artistic life in the middle and late 18th century. Through his art and teaching, he attempted to lead British painting away from the indigenous anecdotal pictures of the early 18th century toward the formal rhetoric of the continental Grand Style. With the founding of the Royal Academy in 1768, Reynolds was elected its first president and knighted by King George III.
Reynolds was the leading English portraitist of the 18th century. Through study of ancient and Italian Renaissance art, and of the work of Rembrandt, Rubens and Van Dyck, he brought great variety and dignity to British portraiture.
His paintings are not perfectly preserved due to faulty technique. The carmine reds have faded, leaving flesh-tones paler than intended, and the bitumen used in the blacks has tended to crack.
Source: http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/500800/Sir-Joshua-Reynolds
http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/artists/sir-joshua-reynolds
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