Sir James Pennyman Bt (1736 - 1808)

Reynolds painted Sir James Pennyman around 1758, a relatively early portrait from the period shortly after his return from Italy. The painting shows Reynolds developing the confident style that would make him the dominant force in British portraiture. Now in a National Trust property, the portrait represents the Yorkshire gentry patronage that supplemented Reynolds's London commissions during his early career. Sir Joshua Reynolds, the first President of the Royal Academy of Arts and the most intellectually ambitious portrait painter of eighteenth-century Britain, combined the social function of the portrait with the elevated aspirations of history painting through his concept of the "Grand Style." His Discourses, delivered to the Royal Academy over fifteen years, codified the academic doctrine of painting in Britain, arguing for the supremacy of the ideal over the particular and the elevated over the mundane. His own portraits attempted to embody this doctrine: sitters placed in settings, poses, and costumes that associated them with the great tradition of painting from Raphael and Titian through Rubens and Rembrandt. Whether or not the attempt always succeeded, it gave British portraiture an intellectual ambition it had previously lacked.

The early portrait shows Reynolds developing his Grand Manner approach, with poses and settings inspired by his Italian studies of Raphael and the Bolognese masters. The warm palette and careful modeling of features demonstrate his emerging mastery of the oil medium, though the handling is more restrained than his later, more confident works.