writer Roger de Piles (1635–1709), appointed as “honorary amateur” in the Academy, stimulated fresh
critical debate there (Crow, 1985, 36). Critical commentary was offered increasingly in France and
throughout the rest of the eighteenth century by a growing number of journalists, amateurs and critics
working outside the Academy (see Chapter 4).
In England the Discourses on Art written and delivered every one or two years between 1769 and 1790
to academicians and students in London by the President of the Royal Academy, Joshua Reynolds,
covered many topics: the need for a disciplined approach to art; the essence of the grand style; the nature
of beauty, invention, expression, color, drapery; consistency of style, taste, imitation, ideal beauty,
novelty, contrast, variety and simplicity; sculpture and modern dress; genius and the need to study old
masters; poetry, painting and nature; and the significance of Gainsborough’s looser style of applying paint.
Though infrequent by comparison with the lectures and seminars offered to twentyfirstcentury fine art
students, Reynolds’ lectures offered, like their French antecedents, important judgments on issues that
permeated all aspects of the academic curriculum, from drawing classes to the choice of masterpieces for
copying. They assumed great authority in critical and aesthetic debates across Europe. The Academy in
London also offered public lectures. Reynolds expresses a perceptibly looser mideighteenthcentury
approach to the “rules” of art than that expressed by the French Académie royale, especially in the latter’s
earlier days of establishing power and authority over artistic production. Even at that time, those who
recorded or articulated academic doctrine, such as Henri Testelin and the writer on art, André Félibien
(1619–1695), knew that it would be applied to practice with a pragmatic moderation.
For Reynolds imitation and originality were not incompatible. He felt it was indispensable to study old
masters in order to gain understanding of the principles guiding their work, the general workings of taste,
but also as a means to achieving individual creativity:
Invention, strictly speaking, is little more than a new combination of those images which have been
previously gathered and deposited in memory: nothing can come of nothing: he who has laid up no
materials, can produce no combinations.
(Reynolds, 1975 [1797], 27)To Reynolds, the artist of “genius” was well educated in the liberal arts of poetry and history, conversant
with the formal techniques and aesthetic principles derived from close study of masters such as Raphael
and Tiziano Vecellio, known as Titian (c.1485/90–1576) and able to create a general effect (rather than a
minute imitation) likely to please the informed viewer (Reynolds, 1959, 198–199). Reynolds himself
drew generously on the compositional formats and details of past masters such as Anthony Van Dyck
(1599–1641), in the creation of his own works (Hallett, 2014, 4–6, 38–39, 59–60, 81–88, 105–108). He
introduced professorships in ancient literature, history and antiquarianism alongside those already
established in painting, sculpture, anatomy, perspective and geometry. Kauffman’s portrait of him reveals
his attachment to learning, including books and a bust of Homer (Figure 1.2). Reynolds considered that the
cultivation of genius, with its judicious yet creative use of erudition, was an essentially male pursuit of
which female artists could offer at most a pale imitation: they were perceived as having little capacity for
independent thought or creativity (Perry, 2007, 50–51).