P.C. Canot after George Lambert and Samuel Scott. A View of Mount Edgcumbe Taken from St Nicholas’s Island , 1755. Etching and engraving.

80 doi:10.1162/GREY_a_00229

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00229 by guest on 01 October 2021 The Cunning of Sir Sloshua: Reynolds, the Sea, and Risk

MATTHEW C. HUNTER

In 1743, Joshua Reynolds broke the terms of his apprenticeship to London painter Thomas Hudson and returned to his native county of Devon. Plying a trade in portraits to an officer class at the major naval base in Plymouth, Reynolds (1723–1792) lived in the newly built Plymouth Dock, a site Daniel Defoe had recently described “as complete an Arsenal, or Yard, for building and fitting out Men of War, as any the Government are Masters of.” 1 It was there that Reynolds established connections to a local elite that would ensure his fortunes. As his pupil James Northcote subsequently told it, “During his residence at Plymouth he first became known to the family of Mount Edgcumbe; who warmly patronized him, and not only employed him in his profession, but also strongly recommended him to the Honourable Augustus Keppel, then a captain in the navy.” 2 Visible across Plymouth sound at left hand in P.C. Canot’s etching and engraving of 1755, the imperious prospect of Mount Edgcumbe was commanded by Richard, first Baron Edgcumbe, an operative in the Whig political machine of Prime Minister Robert Walpole. 3 A political fixer, Edgcumbe brokered Reynolds’s introduction to Augustus Keppel, captain of HMS Centurion . On that ship, the painter traveled to Italy, completing his artistic edu - cation through a grand tour of Renaissance sites. Not only did Reynolds sail out of Plymouth with Keppel in 1749; he then returned to London in 1753, effectively launching his artistic career on Keppel’s likeness. The painter enthralled the London art market by depicting the captain at full length stepping forth along the shore, a picture even a hostile critic called “a work of such truth and nobleness that it fixed universal attention.” 4 Styling his subject as a modern-day Apollo with roiling waters at his back, Reynolds’s Keppel anticipates, perhaps, what Barbara Stafford calls a Winckelmannian aesthetic of the aquatic unknown where bodies move in “a misty, soft swell rising from the surface to sink, in the end, and become lost in the depths of the sea.” 5 In its heroic portrayal of a naval officer, the picture certainly built on Reynolds’s standing military clientele, foregrounding the earthy pragmatism that would underpin his fabulous commercial success in the era of Britain’s victories of the Seven Years War (1756–1763). Astride Britain’s expanding imperial reach, so Douglas Fordham argues, Reynolds used “the modern military officer as

Grey Room 69, Fall 2017, pp. 80–107. © 2017 Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology 81

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00229 by guest on 01 October 2021 both a thematic means and professional model for artistic advancement.” 6 But, there was an earlier pictorial parturition. Before his London entry through an Apollonian Keppel, Reynolds’s birth as a painter had been mythically guided by a Devonian Dionysus. 7 According to a tradition in print by the early 1820s, it was less the political operative Edgcumbe père who had most fruitfully facilitated Reynolds’s career in oil painting. Priority had to be awarded instead to Edgcumbe’s wastrel son, also called Richard, an incorrigible gambler (and confrere of Walpole’s antiquarian son, Horace Walpole) who died heirless at the age of forty-five. Claiming the quarter-length, jowly portrait of periwigged cleric Rev. Thomas Smart as Reynolds’s earli - est foray into oil painting, Victorian biogra - phers Charles Robert Leslie and Tom Taylor cite Edgcumbe junior as the twelve-year-old painter’s goading man-midwife: The local tradition is that this jolly, moon-faced tutor and parson, was a butt of the young Dick Above: Joshua Reynolds. Edgcumbe’s jokes, a humorist from boyhood. Dick put young Capt. Augustus Keppel , 1752–1753. Oil on canvas. Reynolds up to painting Smart’s likeness, from a surrepti - Opposite, top: Joshua Reynolds. tious sketch taken in church. The boys, so runs the story, The Rev. Thomas Smart , 1735. ran down from Smart’s church at Maker to a boat-house, Oil on canvas. and there Reynolds perpetrated the portrait. 8 Opposite, bottom: Samuel Reynolds after Joshua Reynolds. Where printmaker Samuel Reynolds featured the Smart portrait The Rev. Mr. Thomas Smart , 1822. as “Reynolds’ first picture painted when under 12 years of age” Mezzotint. in the set of some three hundred mezzotints he issued after the painter from 1821 to 1826, that primal scene of waterside picture making came to be imagined as a foray in material bricolage. According to William Cotton’s 1856 telling (from which biogra - phers Leslie and Taylor took their account directly), the Smart portrait “was coloured in a boat house at Cremyll beach under Mount Edgcumbe, on canvass which was part of a boat sail, and with the common paint used in shipwrights’ painting sheds.” 9 Recent assessments have cast doubt on this strange canvas that would take the origins of Reynolds’s career from the upstanding house atop Mount Edgcumbe to the boathouse below it—from the solar rectitude of Reynolds’s sailing Keppel to the Edgcumbe’s moored, moon-faced tutor on a sail. 10 The Smart portrait’s reputed facture is instructive nonetheless. Contrary to the mood of adven - titious improvisation invoked by his biographers, Reynolds’s use of sailcloth as pictorial support materializes a historical con - junction between naval power and the technical apparatus of oil

82 Grey Room 69

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00229 by guest on 01 October 2021 painting. At least since the early sixteenth century, Venetian painters had seized on the canvas sails produced in abundance for provisioning the city’s naval and mercantile interests, replacing wooden panels with canvas’s lighter, more mobile support. 11 Later in his career, Reynolds would be keenly cog - nizant of supports and their historicity, shifting in the 1770s from plain-weave canvas to twill in emu - lation of Venetian master Veronese. 12 And while the meanings of Renaissance Venice’s maritime model would be contested among eighteenth- century British observers, Reynolds stood to benefit in his emulative purchasing from the mushroom - ing sailcloth production demanded by Britain’s imperial navy. 13 Reynolds’s Smart was also more than some material compression of oil painting’s technical history. Executed in a boathouse on sailcloth with pigments prepared for painting ships, the Smart portrait revealed to Victorian biographers Leslie and Taylor its own kind of smarts. Made on “rough canvas, roughly painted,” the picture, they claim, is “not without character, and a certain broad clev - erness.” 14 This article aims to give clarity to that cleverness by knocking Reynolds’s originating heads—Smart and Keppel—against one another. Akin to the leaves analyzed in Jennifer L. Roberts’s contribution to this special issue, the article operates through a form of bilateral symmetry with various dorsoventral eccentricities. Each of Reynolds’s cephalic artifacts will have privileged relations to arbiters of power and taste (specifi - cally, to book-matched generations of Edgcumbe and Walpole families). Their co-constituting figu - rations of intelligence will unfold against then rapidly changing fields of chemical and legal-actuarial knowledge, refracted through ancient pictorial media: encaustic and enamel respec - tively. Each head, too, has a complementary, intellectual foil drawn from the Italianate artistic tradition Reynolds privileged in his aesthetic theory. Expanding on what Roberts elsewhere calls “the painting-as-ship analogy” in Reynolds’s influential ambit, this article figures eighteenth-century British liquid intel - ligence as a fluid cunning made in the space between Reynolds’s juvenile work on a fragment of a craft and a mature practice that would turn pictorial craft (or, perhaps, the relationship between maritime and painterly craft) inside out. 15 “Cunning differs from wisdom as twilight from open day.” So

Hunter | The Cunning of Sir Sloshua: Reynolds, the Sea, and Risk 83

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00229 by guest on 01 October 2021 claimed Reynolds’s friend Samuel Johnson in 1760: it “has no other means of certainty than multiplication of stratagems and superfluity of suspicion.” 16 Reynolds’s mode of cunning is best apprehended at this join between his two originating heads, Smart and Keppel: between the material epistemology of chemi - cal experimentation and an architecture of legal-actuarial knowl - edge deployed to transform maritime hazards into attractive risks. To make that argument, a first section takes its cue from the substances and supports reportedly used in the Edgcumbe boathouse. This section reads Reynolds’s liquid intelligence in terms of what recent historians of science have called “material epistemology.” Complicating a standing image of the painter’s incommensurability with contemporaneous natural philosophy, Reynolds’s experiments with pictorial media reveal a shifting conception of painterly knowledge inflected by, but not reducible to, chemical theory. 17 But, returning epistemic purchase to the label “Sir Sloshua” (scurrilously used by Pre-Raphaelite critics of Reynolds’s louche paint handling) is only half the story. A second approach looks back to the dry terrain trod by Captain Keppel in Reynolds’s reputation-making picture, pressing that portrait’s sustained meditation on authority, responsibility, and failure. For Jeff Wall, apprehending photography’s liquid intelligence requires attending to “a speculative image in which the apparatus itself can be thought of as not yet having emerged from the mineral and vegetable worlds.” 18 Reynolds’s fluid cunning, these compared heads suggest, cuts a different course. Forged at the doubled, sem - inal font of Edgcumbe/Walpole generations, it moves between encaustic and enamel. Broadly clever in its Smart manipulations of fluids, that cunning turns like Keppel on a dry support of socially distributed know-how to carry its fragile yield safely through time.

“Common Paint Used in Shipwrights’ Painting Sheds” Ancient precedent sanctioned the traffic between painting ships and depicting the human form central to narratives of Reynolds’s Smart portrait. In his Natural History , Pliny the Elder describes a painter named Heraklides of Macedon who “began by painting ships [initio naves pinxit]” before achieving wider fame in Athens of the second century BCE. 19 By Pliny’s telling, innovations in pictorial techniques of ship ornamentation also found broader, terrestrial service. To standing procedures of encaustic painting, ancient artists had added “a third method, that of employing a brush, when wax has been melted by fire; this process of paint - ing ships is not spoilt by the action of the sun nor by salt water or winds [resolutis igni ceris pencillo utendi, quae picture navibus nec sole nec sale ventisve corrumpitor].” 20 Spurred by the excavations of ancient paintings at Herculaneum

84 Grey Room 69

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00229 by guest on 01 October 2021 and Pompeii (beginning in 1738 and 1748 respectively), eighteenth- century scholars attended keenly to encaustic’s nautical connections. In May 1760, London’s Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (henceforth, Society of Arts) received a treatise on encaustic by Swiss-born artist Johann Heinrich Müntz. An erstwhile protégé of Horace Walpole, Müntz found in Pliny compelling proof that the ancient wax painting techniques then recently reconstructed by the Comte de Caylus and his collabo - rators were indeed distinct from other media. Passages where Pliny “speaks of their ship painting— resolutis igni ceris pencilio utendi ,” Müntz proposed, “carry a silent proof with them that . . . [the heating process] ought not to be understood in so fierce a degree as enameling requires.” 21 Simplifying Caylus’s system, Müntz declared that his own encaustic method would be as impervious to the elements as had been the battleship ornaments of old: “The colours will not be liable to fade and change. No damp can affect it, no corrosive will hurt it; nor can the colours crack and fall in shivers from the canvas.” 22 Founded in 1754, the Society of Arts to which Müntz submit - ted his treatise aimed to spur Britain’s fine and industrial arts against perceived French superiority. The institution awarded cash prizes for British-manufactured goods that satisfied specifi - cations announced in annual prize competitions. 23 While no such prize had been set for encaustic, Müntz’s submission impli - cated Joshua Reynolds in several ways. Elected a society member in early September 1756, Reynolds was named directly by Müntz as a prime candidate for adopting his encaustic process, which required painting with water-based pigments onto a wax-infused support, then heating the work to “permanently” fix the image. 24 Dedicating his treatise to none other than Dick Edgcumbe Jr. (who “saw the first Essays and Experiments in Encaustic”), Müntz sent his text to the Society of Arts with two landscape pic - tures (now lost), which he had prepared using the technique. Likely similar in iconographic features to those he executed con - temporaneously for a patron’s country seat, Müntz’s landscapes were “varnished with the white of an Egg; the other is a Symple dead-colouring fixed, as it came from the fire.” 25 Reynolds, in turn, was selected in June 1760 to serve alongside architect James “Athenian” Stuart and chemist Robert Dossie in the assessment of Müntz’s submission. 26 No record of Reynolds’s participation in the committee’s deliberations survives, but his contact with Müntz’s technique is suggestive nonetheless. As Müntz had done, Reynolds would go on to incorporate egged-wax treatment into some of his most notoriously unstable portraits. 27 Melting wax, egg-fixing images, testing two hundred pounds of powdered verdigris pigment delivered in twelve sacks as Reynolds, William Hogarth, and others would be charged to do

Hunter | The Cunning of Sir Sloshua: Reynolds, the Sea, and Risk 85

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00229 by guest on 01 October 2021 Johann Heinrich Müntz. in 1757: the remit of artistic activity at the early Society of Arts Landscape with a Monument , answers well to the material epistemologies explored by recent 1772. Watercolor with pen and historians of science. 28 Broadly speaking, that conversation has grey ink. sought to return attention to the instruments, physical materials, and practical labor required for doing scientific work, thereby challenging a modernist historiography wherein, as Ian Hacking writes, the “history of the natural sciences is . . . almost always written as a history of theory.” 29 Yet, accounts of what Pamela H. Smith variously calls an “artisanal epistemology” or a “ver - nacular science of matter” frequently chafe against institutional structures. The antiauthoritarian contention advanced by skilled craftspeople of early modern Europe “that knowledge was gained through bodily engagement with matter, that ‘scientific’ knowl - edge (in Aristotle’s sense of ‘scientia’) could be extracted from nature, and that the imitation of nature yielded productive knowledge” was, by Smith’s account, usurped and gelded in the later seventeenth century by an institutionalized philosophy of experiment : the mythical “new science” lionized in familiar histories of the scientific revolution. 30 Narrating such a tale of dematerializing ennoblement maps well onto the shifting sands of artistic intelligence in mid- eighteenth-century London. For, led by Hogarth himself, a faction of painters, sculptors, and architects intent on defining their practices in liberal terms broke from the Society of Arts in 1761. The Royal Academy of Arts that eventually emerged from this defection (with Reynolds knighted as its first president in 1768) systematically eliminated instruction in paint handling, pigment making, and chemistry offered by other rival academies of Georgian London. 31 Instead, emulating the drawing-based pedagogy of the Parisian Académie under Charles Le Brun and Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the new academy’s intellectualized mastery of art-

86 Grey Room 69

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00229 by guest on 01 October 2021 historical precedent found its highest expression in Reynolds’s own Discourses on Art . Relentlessly hostile to an aesthetics of fluidity, the Discourses assigned, so John Barrell writes, “value to what is fixed, settled, permanent, solid, as opposed to whatever is floating, fluctuating, fleeting, variable.” 32 Under the academy’s “dry” regime, liquid intelligence qua material know-how would seem to have become an endangered species. Reynolds’s private enterprise tells a different story. Banished from official academic pedagogy, an understanding of paint’s technics underpinned the flashy coloring and rich, textual effects key to his fabulously successful studio practice. After joining Reynolds’s atelier as an apprentice in 1771, James Northcote wrote frequent letters to his elder brother, a Plymouth-based maker of watches and optical, seafaring instruments. Northcote saw the technical expertise required for crafting precision optics as highly relevant to the production of experimental effects in painting. Explaining to his brother how Reynolds mixed “his colours with varnish of his own because the oils give the colours a dirty yellowness in time,” the apprentice described the proce - dure’s consequence this way: “This [method] of his has an incon - venience full as bad which is that his pictures crack, sometimes before he had got them out of his hands.” 33 Such technical proce - dures were closely guarded as proprietary secrets, annotated by Reynolds in pidgin Italian at the backs of his financial ledgers and withheld from the eyes of his studio assistants. As Northcote later observed, “All his own preparations of colour were most carefully concealed from my sight and knowledge, and perpetu - ally locked secure in his drawers; thus never to be seen or known by any one but himself.” 34 A painting from the era of Northcote’s work in Reynolds’s studio gives substance to the matter. In a self-portrait from around 1775, Reynolds depicts himself turned at half-length, hand tucked into a vermillion jacket. A white kerchief knots at the painter’s throat, intensifying the slice of shadow jutting from his dimpled chin to the ruffles protruding through his velvet coat. Boundaries of the painter’s body—the exact posture of his proxi - mate arm—are lost to the surrounding murk. Withheld as means for rendering form, the heft and thickness of mottled paint thrusts forward into photographic reproduction, glistening with the glare of light’s reflection off its crazed surfaces. On the backs of his financial ledgers, Reynolds details the making of such a self- portrait this way: “Magilp April 27 1772 / my own—1st Aqua e Goma Dragona. Vermilion, lake Black, without yello varnished with Egg after [Venice] Turpentine.” 35 To translate: “megilp” is a painting vehicle made from mastic or turpentine suspended in linseed oil and pursued by painters of Reynolds’s ken with almost cultlike fervor. 36 “Goma Dragona,” painter Sir William

Hunter | The Cunning of Sir Sloshua: Reynolds, the Sea, and Risk 87

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00229 by guest on 01 October 2021 Joshua Reynolds. Beechey explained as he tracked down Reynolds’s technical Self-Portrait , ca. 1775. notes in the early nineteenth century, means “gum Tragacanth, Oil on canvas. for that is a gum which mixes well with water, & makes a mucilage. . . . With this & sugar of lead he mixed Venice turp. or Copaiva, or any Balsam.” 37 Painter Benjamin Robert Haydon, when he published Beechey’s notes on Reynolds in the 1840s, was still more concise. “Heavens!—Murder! Murder!” Haydon exclaimed of the self-portrait’s facture: “It must have cracked under the brush.” 38 Known among Reynolds’s contemporaries, marveled at by his followers: those experimental proclivities figured in the painter’s art theory as fundamentally chemical problems. 39 In his sixth discourse from 1774, Reynolds sought to resolve the apparent contradiction between academic pedagogy based on emulation of past art and a pressing demand for originality. Rather than rely - ing on untutored genius, aspiring painters were instructed to model their enterprise on “the mixtures of the variety of metals, which are said to have been melted and run together at the burn - ing of Corinth, [when] a new and till then unknown metal was produced.” 40 Drawing discrete artistic traditions together and deftly combining them, the artist could achieve startling transmuta - tions: “He will pick up from dunghills what by a nice chymistry,

88 Grey Room 69

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00229 by guest on 01 October 2021 passing through his own mind, shall be converted into pure gold; Benvenuto Cellini. and under the rudeness of Gothic essays, he will find original, Salt Cellar , ca. 1543 . rational, and even sublime inventions.” 41 Transformed by the Enameled gold sculpture. painter’s intelligence, dry slag of the artistic past would give up existing forms to yield new properties with significant value. Academic painting was chrysopoeia. 42 Imagining Reynoldsian liquid intelligence as this “nice chym - istry” cut with material epistemology places it among instructive precedents. Interpreting Benvenuto Cellini’s Saltcellar , Michael Cole claims that virtuosic metal object crafted in the 1540s as a meditation on the goldsmith’s material intelligence. With its interpenetrating figurations of land and sea, the Saltcellar narrates in Aristotelian terms the production of the very salt it carries and a mutability of the metals from which it is made through an alchemical tradition stressing salt’s dynamic, trans - formative agency. Yet, as he highlights the boatlike object’s rud - der, Cole finds the Saltcellar ’s organizing program in “the Ciceronian conception of providence ( prouidentia ) [which] conflated the notion of managerial forethought (typified in good agricultural planning) with the older Greek idea of pronoia , literal foresight.” 43 Merging metallic technics and a poetics of hydraulic control, Cole’s Cellini renders this salt-bearing ship as a seat of capacious intelligence that doubles as a self-portrait of its maker. 44 Sailing under the flag of his juvenile Smart, Reynoldsian liquid intelligence would need to be different from that. Cellini had harnessed capacious learning to artistic mastery of fluids’ physical and poetic potentials. Reynolds not only identified his “nice chymistry” with the very pursuit of gold making that pro - ponents of Enlightenment chemical science were then claiming as the defining, discrediting attribute of alchemy , but his brico - lage of experimental paint preparations was conspicuously open to chromatic, textural, and other material alterations in time. 45 Surveying the faded pigments and cracked surfaces of the

Hunter | The Cunning of Sir Sloshua: Reynolds, the Sea, and Risk 89

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00229 by guest on 01 October 2021 painter’s canvases, near-contemporaries saw the cost of impetu - ous shortcuts. As one wrote, Reynolds made “experiments in using his colours, although he had not acquired, in the earlier part of his life, sufficient chemical knowledge to enable him to judge of the result.” 46 If neither material epistemology unalloyed nor type specimen of advanced chemical science, Reynolds’s approach to materials was perhaps all the more cunning for it. Such is the scandalous implication of work by Neil De Marchi and Hans J. Van Miegroet that sketches elective affinities between Adam Smith’s political- economic analysis of pricing and Reynolds’s unconventional pictorial facture. Where Smith analyzed how a clever maker “could seduce buyers by appealing to their fancy, caprice, or vanity . . . and drive up price” even while shortening labor time, Reynolds effectively put those principles to work. 47 In place of time- intensive demands of pictorial craftsmanship that would render his pictures durable bourgeois commodities, Reynolds and his elite clientele embraced a logic of speculation. “Would-be buyers were necessarily entering into a wager when purchasing a picture by him,” De Marchi and Van Miegroet write. 48 Rather than a pre - dictable investment offering reliable return to the sitter, Reynolds’s unstable craft made pictures a growth opportunity: an option for taking a chance on artistic greatness. Read this way, the bold forms and opportunistic facture of Reynolds’s juvenile Smart flowing forth from that boat house on Cremyll beach could indeed bespeak a “broad cleverness.” A deft management of rationally assembled artistic resources as later stipulated in the painter’s sixth discourse, that way of operating would also require the ancient Corinthians’ openness to felici - tous, metallic transmutations potentially able to yield greater value as they matured in time: like a wine, like an investment. 49 Tellingly, the historical patriarchs who ground my story invented a name for just this kind of opportunism. Reading Francis Bacon in 1754, Horace Walpole—son of the patron whose political client yoked Reynolds to Keppel, friend to that client’s gambling, artistic-goad-of-a-son—had mythically minted the English word for discovery made by accident and sagacity: “serendipity.” 50 In turning from the material-epistemic register, a reciprocal ground for the true cunning in play through Reynolds’s project can be plotted at work in his Keppel portrait itself.

“Cunning Hired Knaves” When painting Capt. Augustus Keppel in 1752–1753, Reynolds had commemorated a moment of conspicuous failure. Cruising off France’s Atlantic coast the spring of 1747, HMS Maidstone under Keppel’s command gave chase to and captured several French privateering vessels. Keppel’s exploits figured regularly

90 Grey Room 69

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00229 by guest on 01 October 2021 in the London newspapers. In early June 1747, they extolled how he had commandeered a French vessel called the Revenge “of 22 Nine Pounders, 20 Swivels, and 280 Men.” 51 That said, the Maidstone ran into serious trouble while pursuing French ships near Belle Isle off the coast of Brittany in late June 1747. “In five more minutes,” Keppel then related to a naval superior, “we struck with such violence that everybody thought that the ship would have gone to pieces. . . . It now being impossible to save his Majesty’s ship, I directed the masts to be cut away, and began to think of saving his Majesty’s subjects.” 52 Keppel and his crew of more than three hundred seamen were rescued, then imprisoned by the French on the island of Noirmoutiers. 53 The Maidstone was utterly destroyed. “Beat to Pieces on a Rock,” as one contempo - raneous newspaper put it. 54 Reynolds’s portrait did not shy away from that destruction. Tossed by the waves crashing onto the craggy beach to the right of the captain are fragments of nautical craft identifiable to con - temporaries as wreckage from the Maidstone .55 Consequently, relations between commander and his wrecked ship—between sitter and the portraitist ostensibly paid to flatter him—have been noted objects of art-historical attention. Figure and ground, wind- swept captain and wreckage are, for David Solkin, means used by Reynolds to aggrandize social status via aesthetic unity at a moment of mid-eighteenth-century crisis of elite confidence. Invoking the posture of a classical source, Reynolds distances his depiction of Keppel both from specific sculptural referent and from the portraitist’s particularities “to produce a picture worthy of being judged not as a portrait, but as a work of great art.” 56 By Douglas Fordham’s account, Reynolds moves between endorsing Keppel’s impetuous, naval risk-taking and marshaling the ship’s drifting debris “like a half-submerged memento mori” to suggest how their hard lessons would be learned. 57 Mark Hallett reads a Whiggish allegory of the fortunate fall in the juxtaposition of Keppel’s Apollonian posture and the shattered ship’s conspicu - ous want of Apollonian pronoia : “In choosing to depict Keppel as if caught up in this catastrophic but ultimately redeeming naval episode, one that formed part of a broader narrative of national conflict and territorial possession, Reynolds defines his subject as a figure actively embroiled in the grand, violent and public sweep of history.” 58 Yet, given the experimental making established in the juvenile Smart portrait and the evidence of material revision discovered in the Keppel portrait itself, the invitation to meditate on competency under strain and responsi - bility put to the test offered by Reynolds’s career-making picture demands equally to be seen as a reflection on pictorial facture. 59 In fact, a remarkable trove of information on the adjudication of hazardous, risk-taking behavior bearing directly on this case

Hunter | The Cunning of Sir Sloshua: Reynolds, the Sea, and Risk 91

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00229 by guest on 01 October 2021 survives. For, seeking to establish the circumstances of the Maidstone ’s loss, the navy subjected Keppel and his officers to court-martial proceedings aboard HMS Duke off Portsmouth harbor in late October 1747. In his deposition, the ship’s pilot, Peter Bougour, testified that after he had confessed his ignorance of the waters through which the fatal chase progressed, word had passed on deck to see if others were more knowing. An old pilot named Peter Bechard, “telling him, as well as Capt. Keppel, that he was acquainted with the Land,” Bougour claimed he had relin - quished “the Charge of the Ship, being out of his Knowledge, to the Captain; and had accordingly not more to do as Pilot of her.” 60 Responsibility for the ship’s subsequent wreck fell not to Keppel but to this makeshift crew. “The Ship was lost,” Bougour testified, “rather through the Ignorance of the said Bechard than anything else; and that every thing was done by the Captain, Officers, & People to save the Ship.” 61 Master of the Maidstone , James Colnett, corroborated Bougour’s narrative. Once Bougour con - fessed his ignorance of the French coast, Colnett attested, Bechard had affirmed himself to be “very well acquainted with . . . [it, and] took Charge of the Ship, and assured Captain Keppel, as well as he this Deponent, that the Chace might be cut off very well.” 62 By contrast, it was Keppel alone who deserved credit for the survival of the crew. So claimed the Maidstone ’s carpenter, Keppel “gave Directions for making of Rafts, whereby the Lives of the Men were saved.” 63 Should responsibility for the ship’s loss lie with the substitute pilot who physically guided the rudder during the wreck? Did the charge fall to Bougour who, despite his moniker as “Pilot for the Coast of France,” had displayed grievous ignorance of his domain? Or would it ultimately rest with Keppel since he had entrusted the Maidstone to such incompetent hands? An Act of Parliament in 1661 established the Royal Navy’s court-martial system to adjudicate such questions. Vested with authority at sea, naval courts-martial were a specialized subset of English common law that would make negligence an increasing object of coherent legislation in the later eighteenth century. 64 Surmounting an older tradition whereby an active petition of injury by a plaintiff was the necessary prerequisite for asserting a defendant’s liability, arguments about negligence turned instead on the propo - sition that agents passively bear a broader mantle of responsibility to which they are duty-bound. Legal historian James Oldham characterizes the development this way: The concept of negligence is fundamentally different from the theory of liability that was the basis of early actions because it marks a shift in focus from the plaintiff’s injury to the defender’s fault, his degree of responsibility.

92 Grey Room 69

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00229 by guest on 01 October 2021 Negligence premises liability on the notion that a defendant has a responsibility to exercise a degree of care to prevent certain harms from occurring and presumes that a defen - dant cannot be held accountable for his acts or omissions unless they resulted from a breach of this responsibility. 65 The lord chief justice since 1756, William Murray, first earl of Mansfield (1705–1793), was a leading figure in the legal expan - sion of negligence from a specific contractual obligation to a standing precept of public policy. Where carriers of goods or innkeepers had traditionally been held in breach of a duty of care if they lost parcels or provided unsafe accommodation, Mansfield and his contemporaries extended protections against negligence more broadly. 66 Ruling in the case of Barclay v. Cuculla y Gana in 1784, Mansfield found the master of a ship anchored on the Thames responsible when the vessel was robbed by eleven armed men. 67 Since the ship stood in analogy with the common carriers hired to transport goods by land, the vessel’s owners were charge - able for losses incurred under their care. By a more expansive argument, Mansfield judged the mayor of London guilty for failing to halt the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots of 1780 (wherein Mansfield’s own house was sacked) as negli - gence of his office. 68 Assessed against the standard of “what a firm and constant man would have done” when faced with mass - ing rioters, Mayor Brackley Kennett was found in dereliction of his duties for declining to call in the military and taking other available steps to halt the violence. Through such arguments, eighteenth-century Britain’s expanding array of middle-class professions were coming to be seen not as liable in a strict sense, but actionable nonetheless for neglect of skillful performance. The doctor and lawyer “were not strictly bound to cure the patient or win the case,” Michael Lobban argues, “but only to act with the requisite level of skill . . . since the harm was not occa - sioned by an act, but by the failure to perform a duty.” 69 The navy of Keppel’s era can be seen as susceptible to expec - tations of professional competency in this sense. Histories of eighteenth-century British military power describe the navy as a crossing point between regnant aristocratic order and consoli - dating middle-class values. “Being part of the profession of arms,” one historian observes, the navy “was especially attached to the code of honour for reasons both sentimental and practical. As a seafaring profession, however, it depended to a very high degree on the technical skill, self-discipline and teamwork which belonged to the man of business rather than to the man of fashion.” 70 Keppel embodied this fusion. Second son of military officer William Keppel, second earl of Albemarle, Captain Keppel was accounted by his contemporaries as a gentleman by birth and

Hunter | The Cunning of Sir Sloshua: Reynolds, the Sea, and Risk 93

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00229 by guest on 01 October 2021 thus was preferred for officer ranking. Yet, he was also sent to sea at the age of ten and amassed significant profes - sional accomplishments before taking command of the ill-fated Maidstone at age twenty. The fruits of those labors were visible through the London press, which advertised the booty Keppel had taken with various vessels. Through the fall of 1747, newspapers touted the loot—266 casks of sugar, four casks of indigo, a cache of coffee, and other cargo—commandeered by the Maidstone and auctioned at Lloyd’s coffee house on London’s Lombard Street. 71 This combination of privileged birth and prodigious, skillful accomplishment figured well against what historian Greg Denning describes as the naval commander’s moral economy. 72 Instructively, Keppel and his officers Advertisement for the auction of were acquitted in 1747 of responsibility for the Maidstone ’s loss. loot taken by Augustus Keppel’s For his part, Reynolds was keenly cognizant of his pictures’ Maidstone. General Advertiser instability. Writing to the owner of a portrait executed in 1762 (London), 20 October 1747. that had aged badly, the painter acknowledged that “for many years I was extremely fond of a very treacherous colour called Carmine, very beautifull to look at, but of no substance.” 73 Employing his assistants Giuseppe Marchi and William Doughty in ongoing repairs to his cracked surfaces and faded canvases, Reynolds refused to be released gently from professional respon - sibility for the fugitive character of his depiction of James Hay, fifteenth earl of Erroll, which had hung at Slains Castle in Aberdeenshire. “Tho you very kindly insinuate an apology for the fading of the Colour of Lord Errol’s Picture, by its hanging in a Castle near the sea,” he observed to the painting’s owner, “I cannot in conscience avail myself to this excuse as I know it would have equally changed wherever it had been placed.” 74 Like the legal subject of negligence, Reynolds recognized a duty of care borne with his works. Painting had long possessed a corporate guardian for such care. Since the late fifteenth century, the Painter-Stainers’ Company had claimed prerogative over anyone wielding a brush within, variously, a four- or six-mile radius of London. 75 Under royal charter, the company possessed rights to stipulate terms of apprenticeship, to search shops for shoddy workmanship, and to take legal action against anyone inclined to bring what one of its petitions called “the art and science of painting . . . [into] utter

94 Grey Room 69

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00229 by guest on 01 October 2021 decaye and ruyne of all suche as woulde gladly endeavour them - selves to be good workmen in the same science.” 76 Gesturing to the Painter-Stainers’ last documented search-and-seizure in the first decade of eighteenth century, Rica Jones interprets Reynolds’s unconventional techniques as an inevitable consequence of the company’s collapse and of eighteenth-century Britain’s broader artistic deregulation. “With no restrictions from guild, academy or court,” she writes, “artists were free to set themselves up and bid for work at all levels with or without formal training.” 77 I am proposing something different. In light of his connections to practical chemistry and logics of generative, serendipitous accident, Reynolds’s conflicted recognition of responsibility might better be used to trace the contours of a new set of rules, not freedom from them. Apprentice James Northcote propels the point potently: When he was at any time accused of having spoiled many of his portraits, by trying experiments upon them, he answered, that it was always his wish to have made these experiments on his fancy pictures, and if so, had they failed of success, the injury would have fallen only on himself, as he should have kept them on his hands; but that he was prevented from practising thus, by his being at the time per - petually employed in painting portraits; and therefore obliged to make his trials on those, as eagerness in the pursuit of excellence was, in him, uncontrollable. 78 For some at the gilded end of London’s luxury market, that exper - imental uncertainty may have been the point. Cultivating an “image of great bravura in the face of high-stakes gambles,” John Frederick Sackville, third duke of Dorset (1745–1799), moved in a milieu where sangfroid and disdain for massive financial loss proved noble status. To court such hazard, John Chu argues, Dorset sank huge sums into the purchase of Reynolds’s critically untested, materially unstable “subject pictures” in the 1770s. 79 But, if Reynolds could acknowledge commercial pressures com - pelling him to compromise on the delivery of durable depictions, then where could his less intrepid clients find protection for substantial financial sums expended on objects potentially liable to go bad? Furthermore, if academic painting had come to be theorized by Reynolds in 1774 as an unpredictable alloy of inten - tion and accident, who was responsible—and could any human be accountable—when the artist’s “nice chymistry” went awry? Lord Mansfield and his circle offer an interesting possibility. In the case of Forward v. Pittard from 1785, Mansfield heard a dispute between a plaintiff who had delivered a load of hops to a carrier for portage from London to Shaftsbury. The cargo was destroyed by a fire at a way station along the more than one-

Hunter | The Cunning of Sir Sloshua: Reynolds, the Sea, and Risk 95

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00229 by guest on 01 October 2021 hundred-mile journey through southwestern England. Although the carrier did not cause the fire, the owner of the hops brought legal action, charging him as responsible for the lost property. Siding against the carrier, Mansfield articulated negligence and its limits in these striking terms: By the nature of his contract, he [the carrier] is liable for all due care and diligence and for any negligence he is suable on his contract. But there is a further degree of responsibil - ity by the custom of the realm, that is, by the common law; a carrier is in the nature of an insurer. It is laid down that he is liable for every accident, except by the act of God, or the King’s enemies. Now what is the act of God? I consider it to mean something in opposition to the act of man: for every thing is the act of God that happens by His permission; every thing, by His knowledge. 80 Like the rising ranks of actuaries then trading marine risks at Lloyd’s coffee house—alongside the booty taken by Keppel’s Maidstone —the carrier was an insurer. By contract and by custom, he assumed the “risk” or indemnity held against any damages to items under his care caused by vicissitudes poten - tially foreseeable to human intelligence. While they could not be held liable for damages suffered due to circumstances predictable only by the omniscience of a god, carriers and insurers both were responsible for failing to take due precaution to prevent what Mansfield described as “inevitable accident.” 81 A carrier who would sell indemnity to an actor engaged in a hazardous commercial transaction where accidents were inevitable, possibly even courted: something like that was attempted in artistic terms by British-born painter William Russell Birch (1755–1834). 82 Birch not only knew both Reynolds and Mansfield, but he claimed to have brokered the artistic relationship between the two in 1785, after the judge had rebuffed the painter’s requests for a sitting for over a decade. 83 Birch’s medium of car - riage was that technique from which Müntz had distinguished encaustic: enamel painting. A fashionable confection, enamel entailed a process where pigmented metal-oxide powders were suspended in vegetal oils, applied onto a coated metallic support, and fired sequentially at temperatures upward of eight-hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Where elite commentators embraced the likeness of Reynolds painting to a wager, Birch participated in that bourgeois domestication of chance Lorraine Daston traces through insurance’s history in the early nineteenth century. 84 Enamel was ideally suited to protecting and carrying Reynolds’s chromatic effects, Birch claimed; it was “the Unique art of hight - ening and preserving the beauty of tints to futurity . . . without a possibility of there changing.” 85

96 Grey Room 69

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00229 by guest on 01 October 2021 While Birch was not alone in asserting the salience of enamel’s prophylactic powers against the hand of time, his work offers privi - leged access to a consolidating legal-actuarial substrate that I see as key to Reynolds’s true cun - ning. 86 In the autobiography he composed from 1815 to 1834, Birch stresses how his enamels’ technical innovations had made them uniquely fit for service to the complicated temporal ontol - ogy of a Reynolds painting. “A principal advan - tage I had in most of my Enamels originated,” Birch claims,

from a thin layer of yellow Enamel under the last coat of William Russell Birch after white, before the flux for the reception of the Colours is laid Joshua Reynolds. William Murray, on the plate; it gives warmth of colouring not otherwise to First Earl of Mansfield , 1793. Enamel on copper. be obtained for the picture, a practice hitherto peculiar to myself and effects the beauty of Age seen in many of the old paintings in oil by the former masters. 87 Where Reynolds’s academic art had embraced rational science and happy accident simultaneously, Birch engineered that equiv - ocation into commercial viability. As recognized by a commen - dation from the Society of Arts in 1784, his enamels were both impervious to change in time and also manufactured to display optical effects of oil paintings’ patinated aging through a distinc - tive yellow flux. 88 Bearing Reynolds’s coloristic legacy into the future, Birch manufactured a model of care that could simulate the chemical accidents to which their authoritative referents were subject even as it protected them against further temporal change. At the same time, Birch’s enamel-multiples responded to British art’s new, in-built hazard by distributing its risk. In his autobiography, Birch lists the names and dates of those who com - missioned his replicas after paintings by Reynolds. Purchasing an enamel copy after Reynolds’s portrait of the Earl of Mansfield from Birch, Sir John Lindsay (the judge’s nephew), Elizabeth Murray (his niece), Mansfield himself, and soldier Thomas Mills all acquired fashionable, indestructible images, following the Enlightenment’s trusted strategy of replication as a guard against cultural loss. 89 By possessing artifacts “that reserved his [Reynolds’s] tints before they faded,” this newly made society of owners might also be understood as exemplifying “the abstract social interde - pendencies created by the commodification of peril and the financial circulation of risk”: what historian Jonathan Levy calls a “risk community.” 90 Such a savvy, indemnifying hedge proceeds less by asserting some divine omniscience over liquids’ inscrutable vicissitudes, as Cellini had done. Instead, like Keppel (maybe even like Reynolds’s portrait of Keppel, which the painter

Hunter | The Cunning of Sir Sloshua: Reynolds, the Sea, and Risk 97

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00229 by guest on 01 October 2021 made sure to have replicated), it bespeaks an appetite for haz - ards, as well as a pragmatic, compensatory capacity to manage them collectively. 91 In a collaborative study, Svetlana Alpers and Michael Baxandall foreground a pragmatic receptivity to liquids’ dynamic effects as a staging ground for freedom in the “pictorial intelligence” of Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696–1770). Working fast and wet to “avoid premature crystallization,” they argue, Tiepolo broke con - ventional academic rules. He seized on the flickering, diurnal patterns of light reflecting off the scintillant surfaces of Venice’s canals and cast upward onto his ceiling supports, building his pictorial schemes in dialogue with them. 92 “Opportunistic and reactive,” Tiepolo’s pictorial intelligence exemplifies a broader program of liberation through embrace of interactive exchange between painted designs and changing site conditions. Fluid, opportunistic, and mobile, that kind of liquid intelligence found supreme expression in Tiepolo’s decorations of Würzburg’s Treppenhaus—a commission seized by the painter, as the authors write, in an appeal to an instructive archetype of freedom, “like the surfer looking for the perfect big wave.” 93 Reynolds, by contrast, had a net. However much he flirted with unconventional combinations of egg, wax, and oils to enliven and accelerate his pictorial facture, Reynolds also courted repli - cators in media, including enamel, who could carry his pictures through time’s hazards. Against Tiepolo’s fluid, athletic virtuos - ity, the freedom of Reynolds’s liquid intelligence, in this second construal, required a legal-actuarial architecture of shared responsibility. 94 Historian Levy envisions a redefinition of liberal freedom in the long nineteenth century built around a commod - ity called “risk,” which had previously been sold to protect mer - cantile interests against the perils of the sea. Thus defined, “individual freedom required a new form of dependence . . . upon a new corporate financial system, the central nervous sys - tem of a rising capitalism that fed off radical uncertainty and ceaseless change.” 95 Reynolds’s experimental craftsmanship was not the same as Keppel’s audacious command of naval craft, but both faced obligations to professional responsibility and duty of care. Keppel could protect himself through multiple courts- martial via the protocols of naval law; he would also use Reynolds’s depictions to defend himself in a court of public opin - ion. 96 As with Johnson’s man of cunning who “always considers that he can never be too safe,” Reynolds turned to the likes of Birch. Capitalizing on hazardous artistic terrain, Birch and other carriers-cum-insurers sold rationalizing pictorial indemnity against the openness to chemical accident that Reynolds had imported into the heart of British academic art. 97 Compared to the hierarchies of the family or the union, theorist

98 Grey Room 69

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00229 by guest on 01 October 2021 François Ewald argues, “insurance provides a form of association Giovanni Battista Tiepolo. which combines a maximum of socialization with a maximum The Institution of the Rosary , of individualization. It allows people to enjoy the advantages of 1738–1739. Fresco. association while still leaving them free to exist as individuals.” 98 Ewald aptly evokes an elective affinity between the actuary’s risks, the insurance legislation founded in part by Mansfield, and the revolutionary social forms embraced by Birch. 99 But, such shifting sodalities of institutional forces, “free” collaborators, and their marine-born logics were also seen by Reynolds’s enemies as truly diabolical intelligence. It was, after all, through the assis - tance of “his Gang of Cunning Hired Knaves,” in William Blake’s

Hunter | The Cunning of Sir Sloshua: Reynolds, the Sea, and Risk 99

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00229 by guest on 01 October 2021 infamous terms, that Reynolds dominated the London art world for as long as he did. 100 Taking up Blake’s terms, I conclude by bringing this cunning join of Reynoldsian material epistemology and actuario-legal hedging back to the sea.

Two Heads, Contrasted View Having caught a right and a sperm whale simultaneously, the crew in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick hangs decapitated heads from opposing sides of the Pequod ’s rigging. On the deck, Ishmael gives voice to some “practical cetology” spurred by com - parison of the massive heads. 101 It is in their lashless, calflike eyes and nearly imperceptible ears, he declares, that the two whales are most similar to each other and also most different from human cephalic anatomy. Both whale species are incapable of seeing what is directly before or behind them since their tiny eyes are in the equivalent position of human ears. By Ishmael’s reckoning, this anatomy informs their cognitive inclinations; it encourages whales to a “helpless perplexity of volition, in which their divided and diametrically opposite powers of vision must involve them.” 102 Crucial differences manifest in comparing the lifeless, cetacean mouths. Where the “mathematical symmetry” of the sperm whale’s warlike head springs a portcullis of ivory teeth, the right whale’s baleen-filled maw frames a head encrusted with crabs, barnacles, and other living beings gathered around its two spouting holes. A paragon of stolid endurance, the right whale’s head answers in Ishmael’s “Laplandish specula - tions” to a very different philosophical constitution: “This Right Whale I take to have been a Stoic; the Sperm Whale, a Platonian, who might have taken up Spinoza in his latter years.” 103 Through comparison of its own hanging heads, this article has pursued a commensurable species of physiognomic analysis. If Jeff Wall sees photography as the yield of liquid intelligence and the camera’s dry apparatus, my proposition is that the “broad cleverness” of experimental facture augured in Reynolds’s child - hood Smart came to generate new modes of distributed responsi - bility shared among replicators and their clientele as the painter’s own Keppel-like courting of hazard expanded. Yet, where the Greek god of cunning, Metis, would be swallowed by Zeus and reborn through his head as Athena, so Reynolds’s bis genitus painting practice and the “Cunning Hired Knaves” it needed can be returned to the sea. 104 When taking depositions from Keppel’s crew in 1747, the court-martial pressed the quartermaster, Jonathan Webb, for precise details on the Maidstone ’s fatal crash: Q: Had you directions from the Pilot, Bechard how to steer the Ship? A: No, Sir, I steered by the Chace.

100 Grey Room 69

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00229 by guest on 01 October 2021 Q: Who cunned you? A: Florance McCarty the Quarter Master. Q: Did not the old Pilot at no time cun you? A: A little while he did while we were getting clear of a Reef of Rocks; but after we past the Reef, he said were clear of every thing else, and out of Danger; tho’ in about ten Minutes after he said this, the Ship struck. 105 As indicated here, cun meant not the physical steering of the ship but the act of directing it from some position on board. 106 Who is in charge when the craft goes awry? If accident has been made part of the art, who stands responsible? So far as I have been able to discern, Reynolds never had to face legal action as Keppel did under charge of professional negligence for his shift - ing, changing, ever-fluid pictures. But Reynolds’s brand of cun - ning and the maritime logics informing it challenge us to apprehend the making of populations equipped to bear painting’s risks consolidating at the heart of eighteenth-century academic art.

Hunter | The Cunning of Sir Sloshua: Reynolds, the Sea, and Risk 101

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00229 by guest on 01 October 2021 Notes The research presented in this article has been supported by grants from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council and the Fonds de recherche du Québec –Société et Culture , along with fellowships from the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, Yale Center for British Art, and the Huntington Library. I thank those institutions along with fellow Grey Room editors, fellow contributors to this special issue, and two anonymous referees for their com - ments. I thank Katharine Anderson, Edward Jones-Imhotep, and Cristina S. Martinez for perceptive critiques and suggestions on earlier drafts. I am happy to acknowledge the research assistance of Jennifer Mueller. All errors are my own .

1. Daniel Defoe, A Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain (London: Printed for J. Osborne, 1742), 1:336. 2. James Northcote, The Life of Sir Joshua Reynolds: Second Edition , 2 vols. (London: Henry Colburn, 1818), 1:26. 3. For this characterization of Edgcumbe, see Sir Joshua Reynolds: The Acquisition of Genius , ed. Sam Smiles (Bristol: Sansom and Company, 2009), 26. 4. Allan Cunningham, The Lives of the Most Eminent British Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (London: J. Murray, 1830), 244. 5. Barbara Maria Stafford, “Beauty of the Invisible: Winckelmann and the Aesthetics of Imperceptibility,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 43, no. 1 (1980): 69. 6. Douglas Fordham, British Art and the Seven Years’ War: Allegiance and Autonomy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 65. 7. On bacchic rebirth, see Richard T. Neer, “Poussin, Titian, and Tradition: The Birth of Bacchus and the Genealogy of Images,” Word and Image 18, no. 3 (2002): 267–281. 8. Charles Robert Leslie and Tom Taylor, Life and Times of Sir Joshua Reynolds (London: John Murray, 1865), 1:14. 9. William Cotton, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and His Works , ed. John Burnet (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, and Roberts, 1856), 30–31. 10. The attribution is retained in the recent catalogue raisonné of Reynolds’s work. See David Mannings and Martin Postle, Sir Joshua Reynolds: A Complete Catalogue of His Paintings (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 1:417. For a dissenting view, see Reynolds: Acquisition of Genius , 33, 185n15. The Smart portrait was sold in December 2012 for the modest price of £2,400. See “Art and Antiques Sale, Sale Results, Lot 332,” Chorley’s, 13 December 2012, http://www.catalogue-host.co.uk/simonchorley/2012-12-13/lot_332. 11. Compare Marcia B. Hall, Color and Meaning: Practice and Theory in Renaissance Painting (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992); and Robert Wald, “Materials and Techniques of Painters in Sixteenth-Century Venice,” in Frederick Ilchman et al., Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 2009), 73–81. 12. See Ashok Roy, Alexandra Gent, and Rachel Morrison, Joshua Reynolds in the National Gallery and the Wallace Collection , vol. 35 of National Gallery Technical Bulletin (London: National Gallery, 2014), 14. 13. Naval commission of sailcloth increased from 5,274 bolts in 1775 to 84,564 in 1780 at the height of the American Revolution. Roger Morriss, The Foundation of British Maritime Ascendancy: Resources, Logistics, and the State, 1755–1815 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 171. On British perceptions of Venetian power, see Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 62–64. 14. Leslie and Taylor, 1:14.

102 Grey Room 69

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00229 by guest on 01 October 2021 15. Jennifer L. Roberts, Transporting Visions: The Movement of Images in Early America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2014), 16. 16. Samuel Johnson, “ The Idler No. 92, Saturday, January, 19, 1760,” in The Works of Samuel Johnson, vol. 4 (New York: Lamb Publishing, 1903), 57. 17. See Martin Kemp, “True to Their Natures: Sir Joshua Reynolds and Dr. William Hunter at the Royal Academy of Arts,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 46, no. 1 (January 1992): 77–88. 18. Jeff Wall, “Photography and Liquid Intelligence,” in Jeff Wall , ed. Thierry de Duve, Arielle Pelenc, and Boris Groys (London: Phaidon, 1996), 90. 19. Pliny, Natural History , trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952), bk. 35, chap. 40 (vol. 9, p. 358–359). See also Deborah N. Carlson, “Seeing the Sea: Ships’ Eyes in Classical Greece,” Hesperia: The Journal of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens 78, no. 3 (2009): 347–365. 20. Pliny, bk. 35, chap. 41 (9:370–371). 21. Jean-Henri Müntz, Encaustic, or, Count Caylus’s Method of Painting in the Manner of the Ancients . . . (London: Printed for the author, and A. Webley, at the Bible and Crown near Chancery Lane, Holborn, 1760), 12. 22. Müntz, 18. 23. The Virtuoso Tribe of Arts and Sciences: Studies in the Eighteenth- Century Work and Membership of the London Society of Arts , ed. D.G.C. Allan and J.L. Abbott (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992), xv–xvi. 24. Müntz, 19. 25. J.H. Müntz to the Society of Arts, 7 May 1760, fol. 1r, in Royal Society of Arts Archive (henceforth RSAA), PR/GE/110/8/145, 7/5/1760. 26. See Minutes of the Society, 1760, p. 91, in RSAA, AD/MA/100/12/01/05. 27. See Hélène Dubois, “‘Use a Little Wax with Your Colours, but Don’t Tell Anybody’: Joshua Reynolds’s Painting Experiments with Wax and His Sources,” Hamilton Kerr Institute Bulletin 3 (2002): 97–106. 28. For verdigris testing, see entry for 16 February 1757 in Minutes of the Society, 1754–1757, p. 227, in RSAA, AD/MA/100/12/01/01. More broadly, see M. Kirby Talley, “‘All Good Pictures Crack’: Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Practice and Studio,” in Reynolds , ed. Nicholas Penny (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1986), 55–70. 29. Ian Hacking, Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Natural Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 149. Various expressions of this larger literature could include: Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986); Peter Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Ways of Making and Knowing: The Material Culture of Empirical Knowledge , eds. Pamela H. Smith, Amy R.W. Meyers, and Harold J. Cook (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014); and Models as Mediators: Perspectives on Natural and Social Sciences , ed. Mary S. Morgan and Margaret Morrison (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 30. Pamela H. Smith, The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 20. See also Deborah E. Harkness, The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), esp. 211–253. 31. See Matthew Hargraves, “Candidates for Fame”: The Society of Artists of Great Britain, 1760–1791 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), esp. 27–28,

Hunter | The Cunning of Sir Sloshua: Reynolds, the Sea, and Risk 103

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00229 by guest on 01 October 2021 102–103; and Holger Hoock, The King’s Artists: The Royal Academy of Arts and the Politics of British Culture 1760–1840 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 52–62. 32. John Barrell, The Political Theory of Painting from Reynolds to Hazlitt: “The Body of the Public” (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 80. 33. James Northcote to Samuel Northcote, 23 August 1771, fol. 1v, in Royal Academy of Arts Archive, MS NOR 4/. 34. Northcote, Life of Reynolds , 2:20. 35. Joshua Reynolds, ledger book vol. 1, fol. 54, in Fitzwilliam Museum, MS 1.1916. 36. See John Gage, “Magilphs and Mysteries,” Apollo 80 (1964): 38–41; and David Bjelalac, Washington Allston, Secret Societies, and the Alchemy of Anglo- American Painting (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), esp. 32–65. 37. The Diary of Benjamin Robert Haydon: Volume V, 1840–1846 , ed. Willard Bissell Pope (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), 578. 38. The Diary of Benjamin Robert Haydon , 578. 39. See Matthew C. Hunter, “Joshua Reynolds’s ‘Nice Chymistry’: Action and Accident in the 1770s,” Art Bulletin 97, no. 1 (March 2015): 58–76. 40. Joshua Reynolds, “Discourse VI” [1774], in Discourses on Art , ed. R.W. Wark (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 106. 41. Reynolds, “Discourse VI,” 107. 42. For a brilliant account of the long, frequently antagonistic relationship between alchemy and the visual arts, see William R. Newman, Promethean Ambitions: Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 43. Michael Cole, Cellini and the Principles of Sculpture (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 30. 44. Cole, 17. 45. See William R. Newman and Lawrence M. Principe, “Alchemy v. Chemistry: The Etymological Origins of a Historiographic Mistake,” Early Science and Medicine 3, no. 1 (1998): 32–65. 46. Joseph Farington, “Memoirs of the Life of Sir Joshua Reynolds with Observations on His Talents and Character,” in The Literary Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds , 5th ed., ed. Edmond Malone, 3 vols. (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1819), 1:ccix. 47. Neil De Marchi and Hans J. Van Miegroet, “Ingenuity, Preference, and the Pricing of Pictures: The Smith-Reynolds Connection,” in Economic Engagements with Art , ed. N. De Marchi and C. Goodwin (Durham, NC: Duke, 1999), 393. 48. De Marchi and Van Miegroet, 396, 401. 49. I thank John Harwood for the latter point. 50. See Sean Silver, “The Prehistory of Serendipity, from Bacon to Walpole,” Isis 106, no. 2 (June 2015): 235–256. 51. General Evening Post (London), no. 2131 (6 June 1747 –9 June 1747). 52. Thomas R. Keppel, The Life of Augustus, Viscount Keppel, Admiral of the White, and First Lord of the Admiralty in 1782–3 (London: H. Colburn, 1842), 1:96. 53. Keppel, 1:98. 54. General Evening Post (London), no. 2147 (14 July 1747 –16 July 1747). 55. For recognition of the Maidstone and details of Keppel’s court martial, see Northcote, Life , 1:63–65. On the spectacle of the shipwreck in contempora - neous British painting, see Christine Riding, “Shipwreck and Storm in British Art,” in Spreading Canvas: Eighteenth-Century Marine Painting , ed. Eleanor

104 Grey Room 69

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00229 by guest on 01 October 2021 Hughes (New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, 2016), 89–111; and Geoff Quilley, Empire to Nation: Art, History and the Visualization of Maritime Britain 1768–1829 (New Haven: Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2011), esp. 145–164. 56. David H. Solkin, “Great Pictures or Great Men? Reynolds, Male Portraiture, and the Power of Art,” Oxford Art Journal 9, no. 2 (1986): 46. 57. Fordham, 68. 58. Mark Hallett, Reynolds: Portraiture in Action (New Haven: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art/Yale University Press, 2014), 102. 59. On the revision to the 1752 Keppel portrait, see Reynolds , ed. Nicholas Penny (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 1986), 181–182. 60. Deposition of Peter Bougour, Pilot of HMS Maidstone, 27 October 1747, fol. 1r–v, in National Archives, ADM 1/5290 (Admiralty, and Ministry of Defence, Navy Department: Correspondence and Papers, 1660–1839; Courts Martial Papers, 1747 Apr–Oct). 61. Deposition of Peter Bougour, fol. 1v. 62. Deposition of James Colnett, Master of HMS Maidstone, 14 October 1747, fol. 1v –2r, in National Archives, ADM 1/5290. 63. Deposition of Thomas Anderson, Carpenter of HMS Maidstone, 19 October 1747, fol. 1r, in National Archives, ADM 1/5290. 64. As an example of the permeability of naval and common law, Lord Chief Justice William Murray, first earl of Mansfield, heard appeals of naval courts- martial in the 1780s. See William Hickman, A Treatise on the Law and Practice of Naval Courts-Martial (London: J. Murray, 1851), 12–13. On the consolidation and transformation of legal thought on negligence, see P.H. Winfield, Select Legal Essays (London: Sweet and Maxwell, 1952), esp. 30–48, 70–97; and Michael Lobban, “Common Law Reasoning and the Foundations of Modern Private Law,” Australian Journal of Legal Philosophy 32 (2007): 39–66. 65. James Oldham, The Mansfield Manuscripts and the Growth of English Law in the Eighteenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 2:1108. 66. Oldham, 2:1109–1110. 67. Barclay v. Cuculla y Gana (1784), 3 Doug. 389. 68. Rex v. Kennett , 488 nb 79 (London, 10 March 1781); 5 Car. & P 282 (1781): 984. More broadly, see Ian Haywood and John Seed, eds., The Gordon Riots: Politics, Culture and Insurrection in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 69. Lobban, 53. 70. N.A.M. Rodger, “Honour and Duty at Sea, 1660–1815,” Historical Research 75, no. 190 (2002): 447. 71. General Advertiser (London), no. 4052 (20 October 1747). 72. By the view of Keppel’s contemporaries, Denning writes, “a commander has to have experience and an immediate and personal sense of the wants, dangers and duties of those he commands. He needs to recognise the part feel - ing and passion play in all the lives of men on ships.” Greg Denning, Mr. Bligh’s Bad Language: Passion, Power, and Theatre on the Bounty (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 108. 73. Joshua Reynolds to Sir William Forbes, 6 August 1779, in The Letters of Sir Joshua Reynolds , ed. J. Ingamells and J. Edgcumbe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 84. For the portrait in question, see Mannings and Postle, 1:249. 74. Reynolds to Forbes, 84. 75. See Alan Borg, The History of the Worshipful Company of Painters,

Hunter | The Cunning of Sir Sloshua: Reynolds, the Sea, and Risk 105

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00229 by guest on 01 October 2021 Otherwise Painter-Stainers (Huddersfield, UK: Jeremy Mills, 2005), 33, 90. 76. Cited in Borg, 32. 77. Rica Jones, “Introduction,” in Paint and Purpose: A Study of Technique in British Art , ed. S. Hackney et al. (London: Tate Gallery, 1999), 11. 78. Northcote, Life of Reynolds 2:21. See John Chu, “Joshua Reynolds and Fancy Painting in the 1770s,” in Joshua Reynolds: Experiments in Paint , ed. Lucy Davis and Mark Hallett (London: Wallace Collection/Paul Holberton, 2015), 86–99. 79. See John Chu, “High Art and High Stakes: The 3rd Duke of Dorset’s Gamble on Reynolds,” British Art Studies , no. 2, http://dx.doi.org/10.17658/ issn.2058-5462/issue-02/jchu. 80. Forward v. Pittard (1785), 1 T.R., 33. 81. Jonathan Levy, Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 43–45 . Compare with Karl Figlio, “What Is an Accident?,” in The Social History of Occupational Health , ed. P. Weindling (London: Croom Helm, 1985), 180–206. 82. For Reynolds’s courting of accident, see his “Discourse XIII” in Discourses on Art , 229–244. The following paragraphs build on and compli - cate arguments proposed in Matthew C. Hunter, “Did Joshua Reynolds Paint His Pictures? The Transatlantic Work of Picturing in an Age of Chymical Reproduction” in Picturing , ed. Rachael Z. DeLue (Chicago: Terra Foundation for American Art, 2016), 44–80. 83. For Birch’s account of his friendship with Mansfield, see his autobio - graphical text as reproduced in Emily T. Cooperman and Lea Carson Sherk, William Birch: Picturing the American Scene (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 173–187. On Mansfield’s patronage of the Adam brothers at Kenwood House, see Eileen Harris, The Genius of Robert Adam (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 180–195. 84. See Lorraine Daston, “The Domestication of Risk: Mathematical Probability and Insurance 1650–1830,” in The Probabilistic Revolution , ed. Lorenz Krüger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 1:237–260. 85. Birch in Cooperman and Sherk, 169. 86. Period commentator John T. Smith had observed that “as much as of the interest of Sir Joshua’s pictures is annually lessened by the fading of his colours, the surest means of handing down to posterity that great Artist’s fascinating style of colouring, [are] the correct copies . . . made of them in enamel.” John T. Smith, Nollekens and His Times: A Life of That Celebrated Sculptor and Memoirs of Several Contemporary Artists, from the Time of Roubilliac, Hogarth and Reynolds to That of Fuseli, Flaxman and Blake (London: Colburn, 1829), 2:292–293. 87. Birch in Cooperman and Sherk, 170. 88. On 3 December 1784, Birch was awarded a silver pallet from the Society of Arts as a bounty for his “Specimens of Painting in Enamel in Imitation of Oil Painting.” Committee Minutes 1784, fol. 87–89, in RSAA. I thank RSA archivist Eve Watson for supplying this information. 89. See Andrew McClellan, Inventing the Louvre: Art, Politics, and the Origins of the Modern Museum in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 71. 90. Birch in Cooperman and Sherk, 172; and Levy, 22. I thank Oliver Wunsch for pushing me on this point. 91. On the production of Edward Fisher’s mezzotint after Reynolds’s Keppel , see Penny, 183.

106 Grey Room 69

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00229 by guest on 01 October 2021 92. Svetlana Alpers and Michael Baxandall, Tiepolo and the Pictorial Intelligence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 70, 74; emphasis in orig - inal. 93. Alpers and Baxandall, 99. 94. See Alexander Nemerov, “The Cauldron: Rubens’s Adoration of the Magi in Madrid,” in “Wet/Dry,” ed. Christopher S. Wood, special issue, Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics , no. 63/64 (Spring/Autumn 2013): 238–247. 95. Levy, 6. 96. For Keppel’s use of Reynolds in this way, see Daniel O’Quinn, “Facing Past and Future Empires: Joshua Reynolds’s Portraits of Augustus Keppel,” in The Culture of the Seven Years’ War: Empire, Identity, and the Arts in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World , ed. Frans De Bruyn and Shaun Regan (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), 307–338. 97. Johnson, 57. 98. François Ewald, “Insurance and Risk,” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality , ed. Graham Burchell et al. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 204. 99. On Birch’s politics, see Cooperman and Sherk, 27–30. 100. Blake’s annotations to his copy of Reynolds are reproduced in Reynolds, Discourses of Art , 284. 101. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick: An Authoritative Text, Reviews and Letters by Melville, Analogues and Sources, Criticism (New York: Norton, 1967), 278. 102. Melville, 280. 103. Melville, 284. 104. See Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant, Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society , trans. J. Lloyd (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1978). 105. Minutes of Court Martial, held on board HMS the Duke, in Portsmouth Harbour, 31 October 1747, p. 7, in National Archives, ADM 1/5290. 106. See Margaret Cohen, “Fluid States: The Maritime in Modernity,” in “The Sea,” special issue, Cabinet , no. 16 (Winter 2004–2005): n.p.

Hunter | The Cunning of Sir Sloshua: Reynolds, the Sea, and Risk 107

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00229 by guest on 01 October 2021