Portrait of Mrs. Barnard

Reynolds painted Mrs. Barnard around 1767, a female society portrait from the height of his mature period that demonstrates the professional command that made him the most sought-after portraitist in Britain throughout the 1760s and 1770s. Reynolds was at this date producing something like fifty to sixty portraits per year, and the Barnard canvas represents his ability to maintain consistent quality across an output of extraordinary volume. The Mead Art Museum at Amherst College holds the painting as part of an American university collection whose British portraiture holdings were assembled through the active transatlantic market of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Amherst College's naming after Sir Jeffrey Amherst — also painted by Reynolds — gives the institution an interesting double connection to the painter's oeuvre. Reynolds's consistent quality in female portraiture of this period reflects the studio system he had developed: first sittings focused on the head, with the rest completed through a combination of direct observation and lay-figure work, the whole integrated and finished by Reynolds himself. The result was professional, reliable, and occasionally brilliant.

The portrait presents the sitter with elegant refinement. Reynolds's handling demonstrates his mastery of the female portrait genre.