In r773, on the occasion of a visit to his native place, Sir Joshua was elected mayor of Plympton. He was now at the zenith of his career, his works universally admired, and his studio thronged by the great. One cannot help contrasting such a career with that of so many men in art and letters, of genius not inferior to that of Reynolds, whose lives have been full of hardships and struggle, and wonder why Fortune should be so capricious in her favors.
The was one of the works of Reynolds which has achieved the widest repute, and of which he made a number of replicas. In the portrait of Hrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse we see the powers of Reynolds displayed to their utmost. If incapable of composing works of pure imagination like those of Da Vinci or Raphael, he approached creative genius in portraits like this, in which a certain degree of imagi nation entered into the arrangement and the expression. He was first of all a portrait-painter, who infused an extraordinary combination of art and nature into his canvases. He was also one of the finest colorists of the English school. His natural eye for color was good, and he improved it by a careful study of the Renaissance masters of color, Titian, Rubens, and Veronese. For several years he delivered a course of art-lectures at the Royal Academy; these discourses still keep their place in libraries of art. The style is dignified and cultured, and the thought, if not strictly original, is in general judicious.
Sir Joshua Reynolds expired on the 23d of February, 1792, in the sixty-ninth year of his age. Honors followed him after death; an immense cortege of coaches of the first people in the land escorted his body to the grave. He was laid in a crypt of St. Paul's Cathedral, by the side of Sir Christopher Wren. A statue of him by Flaxman was afterward placed in the cathedral.
Reynolds left upward of ode hundred and thirty historical compositions and a multitude of superb portraits which still remain among the riches of the United Kingdom. He was particularly successful in representing feminine grace and beauty, and there was scarce an English titled lady of the time who did not give him a sitting and in turn receive immor tality from his brush.
Early Richard II ilson.—While Sir Joshua Rey nolds was carrying portrait-painting to such a height at one bound, as it were, there was another painter in England who through great struggles and privations was engaged in founding the school of landscape-painting —a department in which England has excelled every other nation. We
refer to Richard Wilson, who was the son of a clergyman, and was born at Pinegas in Montgomeryshire, Wales, in 1713, ten years before Reynolds. After slight provincial tuition, this young painter had made such progress in portraiture that he received a commission to paint a portrait of the prince of Wales. It was not until he was thirty-six years of age that Wilson discovered what was his true vocation. Having with great difficulty succeeded in saving enough to go to Italy, he was accidentally led to take up a branch of art which brought him fame after his death, but little money or reputation during his life. While waiting for the painter Francesco Zuccherelli (17o2–r 793)11e passed the time in sketching the view from the window; Zuccherelli was so much impressed with the excellence of the drawing that he advised Wilson to abandon portraiture and take up landscape-painting. The classic associations of Italy sug gested to the artist a poetic form of landscape-composition in which legend entered into his representations of scenery; this form of composition was further elaborated at a later period by no less an artist than Turner.
But the time was not vet ripe for landscape-painting in England; the study of Nature was still awaiting the coining of Thomson, Burns, Cowper, and Wordsworth. It is singular that during so many ages the cultivated mind had enjoyed the loveliness of scenery, the tender colors of the sunset sky, and yet remained unconscious of the sources of such enjoyment. The feeling was there, but dormant. A certain degree of culture seems essential to an appreciation of the loveliness of external nature.
But if Richard Wilson was apparently unfortunate in winning popular applause, his career must still be pronounced successful; for lie was the founder of a school, and certainly one of the first to direct the eye of his fellow-countrymen to the beautiful scenery of their lovely island. In his latter years, oppressed by long neglect and privation, he retired to a small homestead in Wales which he inherited about that time. But he failed to recover his spirits, and died under his humble roof in 17S2. It is said that Reynolds treated Wilson with a harshness which he lived to regret.