Reynolds and celebrity: Ferrara is the setting for an enthralling exhibition on Reynolds and his sitters

Apollo, May, 2005 by Hugh Belsey

It appears that media hype has been part of the British way of life for some time. This exhibition, beautifully staged at the Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara, is about being famous for being famous. The inscription on Valentine Green's print of Reynolds's Self-portrait provides the baldest evidence for this. The portrait appears to have been painted to mark the Royal Academy's move to purpose-built premises in Somerset House in 1780 and to publish the message abroad Green was commissioned to make a fine mezzotint of the subject. The inscription, Reynolds's curriculum vitae, reads: 'Sir Joshua Reynolds, Knight, President of the Royal Academy, Member of the Imperial Academy at Florence, Doctor of Laws of the University of Oxford and Dublin, And Fellow of the Royal Society'. Green's credentials--'Mezzotinto Engraver to his Majesty, and to the Elector Palatine'--confer further status on the sitter and, just for good measure, the bust of Michelangelo on a table nods in deference to the great, perhaps greatest, British painter.

There can be little doubt that Reynolds is a great British painter and one leaves the exhibition in admiration of his unwavering confidence and his consistent ability to promote his standing as the most successful portraitist of the age. This exhibition gives full recognition to the duality of portraiture and confers on the sitter a status equal to the portraitist. Reynolds was determined to attract the most famous sitters to his studio and those that did not wish to pay for their portraits were often persuaded to sit to him so that the ensuing work of art could be used to promote the artist's interests. Consequently this exhibition highlights, to use current parlance, Reynolds's networking abilities and thereby provides an enlightening overview of late-eighteenth-century London society. So the pendulum of purpose swings to and fro, oscillating between sitter and portraitist. (Interestingly, musicians are inadequately represented amongst Reynolds's sitters, an area that Gainsborough monopolised.)

That said, Reynolds's personality shines through and the exhibition provides a very clear sense of development in his later work. Paintings from the early 1760s come across as having a particularly imaginative flair, an observation that will be bolstered by some of the ten or so works that will join the exhibition when it is shown at Tate Britain. The careful and original selection of exhibits has brought a number of paintings out of relative obscurity. The recent acquisition by the Yale Center for British Art of an early self-portrait painted when the artist was in Rome in about 1750 shows a softness learnt from Gaetano Gandolfi and owes much to the portrait of John Parker by Marco Benefial that Reynolds would have seen in the Academia di San Luca. In the great portrait of Lord Granby, from Sarasota, the sitter adopts the pose of The Farnese Hercules; this gives the greatest soldier of the period the necessary gravitas, which the artist skilfully unites with a realism that gives this canvas a special power. The intimacy of the unfinished portrait of Kitty Fisher from Bowood provides a particularly attractive contrast in mood.

The exhibition has been orchestrated by Martin Postle. His detailed command of the subject has pinpointed the purpose of many of the individual commissions, which increases our appreciation of Reynolds's razor-sharp professionalism. For instance, the portrait of Laurence Sterne from the National Portrait Gallery, painted shortly after the publication of Tristram Shandy in 1760, shows all the mercurial intelligence of the sitter, which, like his writing, becomes offbeat once one notices that Sterne's wig is carelessly askew. In the uneasy portrait of Lord Dunmore (Scottish National Portrait Gallery) the torn and broken vegetation in the background illustrates Scotland's unhappy relations with England at the time, but the growth of new shoots anticipates, in rather a literal way, the country's metaphorical turn of a new leaf. The hostess Miss Mary Monkton (Tate), painted in 1777, was described shortly after she sat to Reynolds as 'very short, very fat, but handsome, splendidly and fantastically dressed ... palpably desirous of gaining notice and admiration'. Reynolds provides her with an impishly inquisitive air but cleverly conceals her figure.

The question of quality always takes precedence in an exhibition and the loans rarely fall below Reynolds's highest standard. Omai is triumphantly and appropriately included in the exhibition, but the sketch for it from Yale would have been more appropriately used as a catalogue illustration and the Tate's portrait of Lady Talbot remains a difficult picture to love.

The exhibition does not provide the expansive review of the artist's work that was shown so memorably at the Royal Academy in 1986. That exhibition, which spawned so much research (this show included), was very different: the two displays show how the study of British art has shifted in emphasis, from connoisseurship to social history.