Catherine Moore

Reynolds painted Catherine Moore around 1754, a portrait from the period immediately following his return from Italy. The painting shows the new confidence and breadth of style that his Italian experience had fostered. Now at Kenwood House in Hampstead, part of the Iveagh Bequest, the portrait benefits from display in one of London's finest collections of Georgian painting, alongside works by Gainsborough, Vermeer, and Rembrandt. 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.

Executed with warm chiaroscuro and attention to classical references in poses, the work reveals Joshua Reynolds's characteristic approach to composition and surface. The treatment of light and the careful modulation of color create visual richness within a unified pictorial scheme.