Portrait Of A Woman, Said To Be Mrs. Barnard

Reynolds painted this Portrait of a Woman, said to be Mrs. Barnard, around 1758. The uncertain identification is common among Reynolds's many society portraits, where the identity of sitters was sometimes lost as paintings changed hands through the art market. The painting demonstrates Reynolds's accomplished early style, showing the influence of his Italian training in the confident composition and warm tonality. 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 sitter's features are rendered with Reynolds's characteristic warmth, the flesh tones built up through rich glazes that create a luminous, almost translucent quality. The costume is handled more broadly, subordinated to the face which receives the painting's most careful attention.