Portrait of Oliver Goldsmith (1728-1774), Playwright and Author

Reynolds painted his friend Oliver Goldsmith around 1772, two years before Goldsmith's premature death and during the period when his reputation as a writer was at its height. Goldsmith — Irish-born, chronically impecunious, and of irrepressible sociability — was one of the most beloved figures in Reynolds's circle, the author of The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), She Stoops to Conquer (1773), and the poem The Deserted Village (1770). Reynolds and Goldsmith met through Samuel Johnson and became close friends; Johnson himself described Goldsmith as a man who 'wrote like an angel but talked like poor Poll.' The portrait, now in the National Gallery of Ireland, carries the particular tenderness that Reynolds brought to paintings of close friends: the characterization is more intimate and less formally composed than his society portraits, reflecting an observation of Goldsmith in relaxed social contexts rather than the studio conditions that shaped his formal commissions. Reynolds later served as executor of Goldsmith's estate, inheriting the debts that his improvident friend had accumulated. The painting is among the finest documents of the literary circle that made Georgian London one of the great cultural capitals of European history.

The portrait captures the writer with warmth and intellectual presence. Reynolds's handling creates an image of literary distinction.