If you want to see a Who’s Who of the movers, shakers, and celebrities of 18th-century Georgian society, look at Sir Joshua Reynolds’ portraits in the collections of galleries and country houses across Britain. Here you’ll find intellectuals and writers like Samuel Johnson (in the National Portrait Gallery, London); aristocrats like the Spencer family (in Althorp, Northamptonshire); trend-setting Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire (at Chatsworth, Derbyshire); and the fashionable, publicity-savvy courtesan Kitty Fisher (in Petworth House, West Sussex), who once staged a horse-riding accident in Hyde Park to show off her shapely thighs.
Throughout his career, Reynolds painted over 2,000 portraits, became the founding president of London’s Royal Academy of Arts, and set himself a mission to raise the reputation of lowly “face-painting” and of British-born artists and their art. On the tercentenary of his 1723 birth, he is being celebrated with a host of exhibitions
