Blog post #4 Neoclassicism, Romanticism, & Rococo

Sir Joshua Reynolds was an English painter specializing in portrait in the 18th century, and the first president of the Royal Academy of Art.Beside creating large scale full body portrait, Reynolds also painted a large number of smaller works. During the late 1750s, in an average day he did about five to six portrait piece each for an hour. Moreover, he also did some other genre of drawing such as landscape and children portrait. To be more specific, his piece named the age of innocence was well known for emphasizing the child’s impression and her grace.

Reynolds’s belief in art maybe somewhat boring to us, the modern people; but it had stood firmly in the neoclassicism period. He considered that an artist should carefully study and imitate the dignity of classic Italian masters; and the pieces that were worthy of the name of Art are only those that were grand and impressive, like those landscape painting that had even the smallest detail. However, his actual works were mainly portraits, the kind of painting that was always in high demand in England. Even though, with great elegance and gracefulness, his portraits still established a standard for its kind, that even painters of later generation wanted to reach. In one of his notable work, “Miss Bowles with her dog”, Reynolds brought out the impression of a sweet child and the affection between her and her little pet. Later, this way of setting up became a common concept among photographers, but it was quite original at his time, and cannot make light of due to imitation from the later time.

For me personally, I can understand why he is so famous for his portrait pieces they all look so lively and the viewer can almost sense somewhat of the model’s personality. He putted lots of effort to illustrate human’s expression and  love how he painted  eyes in  all of his art work.