Art-Reynolds-Miss Mary Hickey TB

Please drop this item in rural OR Premium Member Only caches.  Do not place it in an urban cache or abandon it at a caching event.  Transport the bug in the original plastic bag for as long as the bag lasts; the bag keeps the trackable clean, protects the number and prevents tangling with other items.  Otherwise, take the travel bug anywhere you wish.  No permission is needed to leave the U.S.

Photos in the travel bug logs are appreciated.  I will be re-post them here, where they can be seen by other cachers.

I have already released several groups of art-themed travel bugs.  While I have seen numerous works by British artists in my travels, I find they are underrepresented among my TBs.  This is one in a small series to correct that oversight.

Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792) was an influential eighteenth-century English painter, specializing in portraits. He promoted the "Grand Style" in painting which depended on idealization of the imperfect. He was a founder and first president of the Royal Academy of Arts, and was knighted by George III in 1769.  Reynolds was born in Plympton, Devon, the third son of the Rev. Samuel Reynolds, master of the Free Grammar School in the town. One of his sisters was Mary Palmer, seven years his senior, whose fondness for drawing is said to have had much influence on Joshua when a boy. In 1740 she provided £60, half of the premium paid to Thomas Hudson the portrait-painter, for Joshua's pupilage, and nine years later advanced money for his expenses in Italy.  

As a boy, he came under the influence of Zachariah Mudge, whose Platonistic philosophy stayed with him all his life.  The work that came to have the most influential impact on Reynolds was Jonathan Richardson's An Essay on the Theory of Painting (1715). Reynolds' annotated copy was lost for nearly two hundred years until it appeared in a Cambridge bookshop, inscribed with the signature ‘J. Reynolds Pictor’, and is now in the collection of the Royal Academy of Arts, London.

Reynolds worked long hours in his studio, rarely taking a holiday. He was gregarious and keenly intellectual, with many friends from London's intelligentsia.  Because of his popularity as a portrait painter, Reynolds enjoyed constant interaction with the wealthy and famous men and women of the day.  He was one of the earliest members of the Royal Society of Arts, helped found the Society of Artists of Great Britain, and in 1768 became the first President of the Royal Academy of Arts, a position he was to hold until his death.

In 1784 Allan Ramsay died and the office of Principal Painter in Ordinary to the king became vacant. Reynolds rival, Gainsborough, felt that he had a good chance of securing it.  However, Reynolds felt he deserved it and threatened to resign the presidency of the Royal Academy if he did not receive it.  It did not make Reynolds happy,as he wrote to Boswell: "If I had known what a shabby miserable place it is, I would not have asked for it.  So, he had the title, but Gainesborough remain the King’s favorite painter.

The portrait featured on this travel bug may not be one of Reynolds’ more famous works, but it caught my eye as I scanned through the images.