Mrs. Chalmers

Reynolds painted Mrs. Chalmers around 1755, a portrait from the period immediately following his return from Italy that shows the decisive influence of his Continental study on his approach to female portraiture. Reynolds had spent two and a half years in Italy between 1749 and 1752, absorbing the lessons of the Old Masters with characteristic thoroughness: his notebooks record hundreds of observations on Raphael's compositional methods, Titian's use of colour and glazing, Michelangelo's treatment of form, and the chiaroscuro methods of the Bolognese school. The practical consequences appeared almost immediately in his post-Italian portraits: a new warmth of colouring, greater compositional confidence, and the ability to subordinate costume and setting to psychological characterization that had eluded his pre-Italian work. Mrs. Chalmers represents this transitional phase — the application of Italian lessons to an English subject — with a naturalness that suggests Reynolds's European education had been fully assimilated rather than mechanically applied. Now in the Detroit Institute of Arts, the portrait belongs to the American institutional collections that gathered Reynolds's works throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The portrait presents the sitter with developing elegance. Reynolds's early handling shows the foundations of his mature portrait technique.