Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792), the outstanding intellectual force among English artists of his age, virtually created a new type of portraiture by interpreting the humanity of his sitters in terms of the heroic tradition of Old Master history painting.

Joshua Reynolds was born on July 16, 1723, at Plympton, Devon, the third son and seventh child of the Reverend Samuel Reynolds, master of the Plympton Grammar School and sometime fellow of Balliol College, Oxford. Joshua was enabled by education, ability, and inclination to move all his adult life with ease and distinction in literary and learned circles. A vocation for art was confirmed by reading as a boy Jonathan Richardson's Essay on the Theory of Painting (1715), with its program for restoring portraiture to the dignity of high art, and at the age of 17 Joshua was apprenticed to Richardson's son-in-law, Thomas Hudson, in London.

Reynolds set up on his own in...