Sir Joshua Reynolds 300th anniversary

Portrait of Charlotte Grote

Sir Joshua Reynolds PRA, FRS, FRSA (16 July 1723-23 February 1792) was portrait painter and aesthetician who dominated English artistic life in the middle and late 18th century and was one of the major European painters of that time. Through his art and teaching, he attempted to lead British painting away from the indigenous anecdotal pictures of the early 18th century towards 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.