Joshua Reynolds was an English painter and the leading portraitist of eighteenth-century Britain. Born in Plympton, Devon, he was apprenticed in 1740 to the London portrait painter Thomas Hudson. From 1749 to 1752 he travelled through Italy, studying the Old Masters, especially Raphael, Michelangelo, and the Venetian colourists, an experience that shaped his ambitions to elevate British painting.
Settling in London, he quickly became the most sought-after portraitist of the age, combining the dignity of classical art with natural, flattering likenesses. His sitters included nobility, actors, writers and military heroes. In 1768 he became the founding president of the Royal Academy of Arts, and he was knighted the following year. His Discourses on Art, delivered to students at the Academy, remain influential statements of academic theory. Reynolds became court painter to George III in 1784.
He died in London in 1792 and is buried in St Paul’s Cathedral.
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