Video No. 6030. English Language Pal VHS.
An Exploration of Art on Film.
'Artist Of The Portrait'.
Directed by Christopher Martin.
The commanding figure of 18th century British art and one of the finest portrait-painters of any era, Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-92) produced a huge body of work that today sums up the ideals and aspirations of an entire period, the golden age of the English aristocracy.
This film presents a wide-ranging assessment of Reynolds's artistic and intellectual achievements, particularly in setting the agenda for the "English School" of art and in defining a new greatly enhanced role for the artist in society. It shows how, as a highly ambitious young man, Reynolds set about creating an approach in portraiture based on the stylistic canons of Classical art and on his own unrivalled professionalism; by the time he was knighted in 1769, Reynolds had proved that English painters - like their Classical or Italian Renaissance counterparts - could aim for the highest levels of social recognition.
As the first President of the newly formed Royal Academy, he also exercised enormous influence on artistic taste and practice. Though his work fell out of favour in the Romantic periods, Reynolds emerges in this programme as an extraordinarily subtle and intelligent interpreter of the human face, admired today for the decisive individuality he gave his portraits. His sitters included many of the rich and powerful men of his day, but he displayed perhaps even greater empathy in his portraits of women and children.
As it follows the preparations for a major exhibition, this film presents a masterly overview of his prodigious work.
