Saint John the Baptist in the Wilderness

Reynolds painted Saint John the Baptist in the Wilderness around 1776, his most ambitious single-figure religious composition and a demonstration of his aspiration to compete with Continental painters in the sacred subjects that his Discourses placed at the pinnacle of artistic ambition. Reynolds had argued consistently throughout his career that history painting — including religious subjects — represented the highest form of art, yet his own practice was dominated by portraiture that paid the bills and satisfied a specifically British demand. The Saint John composition allowed him to bridge the gap: using a child model (as he did in The Infant Samuel and The Strawberry Girl), he created a figure that combined the naturalism of his observed portraiture with the elevated subject matter of biblical narrative. The wilderness setting drew on both Italian Mannerist landscape and the Dutch tradition of forest scenes, filtered through Reynolds's synthetic compositional intelligence. The Wallace Collection's holding of the canvas, alongside several other Reynolds religious and allegorical works, makes it one of the finest institutional representatives of his ambition to exceed the portrait genre that defined his commercial reputation.

Reynolds applies the warm Venetian color and broad handling he admired in Titian to this religious subject. The Baptist's muscular figure is modeled with the dramatic chiaroscuro that Reynolds derived from his study of Italian Baroque painting during his Italian sojourn.