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

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The Cunning of Sir Sloshua: Reynolds, the Sea, and Risk 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.
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