Papers on Art

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: III. SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS. There is for many reasons something peculiarly touching in the confession of faith with which Sir Joshua Reynolds closes his last discourse to the students of the Royal Academy. The occasion is the annual distribution of prizes in December of the year 1790, and he is speaking of the great genius whom he so little resembled and so much admired. It will not, he says, I hope, be thought presumptuous in me to appear in the train, I cannot say of his imitators, but of his admirers. I have taken another course?one more suited to my abilities and to the taste of the times in which I live. Yet however unequal I feel myself to that attempt, were I now to begin the world again, I wouldtread in the steps of that great master: to kiss the hem of his garment, to catch the slightest of his perfections, would be glory and distinction enough for an ambitious man. I feel a self- congratulation in knowing myself capable of such sensations as he intended to excite. I reflect, not without vanity, that these discourses bear testimony of my admiration of that truly divine man; and I should desire that the last words which I should pronounce in this academy, and from this place, might be the name of Michelangelo. These eloquent sentences were, indeed, the last public utterance of their author. Within fourteen months of the time of their delivery Reynolds died peacefully at his house in Leicester Square, congratulating himself, as Burke tells us, on a happy conclusion of a happy life. And even at this date his career as a painter was already at an end. He had entirely lost the sight of one of his eyes, and could no longer work at his easel. In the January of the same year, writing to Sheridan, who had asked to be allowed to purchase the beautiful picture of St...