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Discourses on Art
This standard edition of the Discourses on Art delivered by Sir Joshua Reynolds is now reissued in a new format and with improved illustrations. It has long been recognized as a fundamental text for the study of eighteenth-century English painting, and this edition is generally considered to be the definitive one.Robert R. Wark was Curator of Art Collections at the Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery.Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art
388 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1888
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Joshua Reynolds
258 books10 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.
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Sir Joshua Reynolds RA FRS FRSA was an important and influential 18th century English painter, specialising in portraits and promoting the "Grand Style" in painting which depended on idealisation of the imperfect. He was one of the founders and first President of the Royal Academy. George III appreciated his merits and knighted him in 1769.
See this thread for more information.
Sir Joshua Reynolds RA FRS FRSA was an important and influential 18th century English painter, specialising in portraits and promoting the "Grand Style" in painting which depended on idealisation of the imperfect. He was one of the founders and first President of the Royal Academy. George III appreciated his merits and knighted him in 1769.
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February 24, 2025Unbearable man. I’m team Blake
October 5, 2022
Reynolds’ Discourses are like a Westminster Confession of Faith for classical Western art – a formal expression of received ideas offered at the final moments of those ideas’ influence. The introduction to my edition called Reynolds’ theories a “coda” to an age of art about to give way to Romantic individualism. That seems about right. Some thoughts on the passing pages…
Reynolds agrees with Johnson that studying by inclination is best. Johnson elided a full idea, but Reynolds goes into greater detail by qualifying this advice as appropriate only for intermediate students who have been disciplined in the fundamentals of their pursuit and oriented toward the Good, True, and Beautiful. Assuming Johnson thought along the same lines as his fellow Club member, then, this sentiment is pretty far from the rubber stamp on autonomy that people want to make it.
Speaking of the Club, Reynolds describes artistic inspiration and borrowing in the same generational terms that Burke used to describe civil society in general. Maybe it has already been written, but there is clearly a book in the relationship of ideas between Club members. (And how natural law informed those ideas.)
Reynolds describes true wisdom as sensing one’s imperfection and having the humility to grasp collective observation. He takes it as obvious that the subject (Nature) is so complex that no one man can achieve a perfect perception through his own capabilities. Going back to the WCF, I wish that evangelicalism would understand this is just as true vis-a-vis systematic theology, confessions, and streams of Christian faith.
Reynolds’ hierarchical thinking is very classical and very impossible to imagine on this side of the Western democratic revolution. He perceives that all arts have a lower form and a higher form. The lower appeals to common taste and is judged correctly on verisimilitude to particular nature and. The higher form requires cultivated taste and is judged by the extent to which it transcends particular nature to achieve an imaginative vision of Nature in General – e.g. the perfect beauty of mythical Helen vs. the particular beauty of the artist’s model.
And speaking of taste – as the higher forms are artificial, and clearly not natural (e.g. opera or grand historic painting), it’s to be expected that people are not born with that taste. They’re born with the “seeds” of it, which must be ripened into cultivated, artificial taste. And to some extent you have to fake it until you make it. I’ve found this to be true about many things in life – the will to appreciate something precedes the appreciation, which does not invalidate the authenticity of the appreciation. We commonly understand this about whiskey and tobacco but our democratic, individualizing context makes us reluctant to admit it about art, music, literature, etc. “Eagerly desire the greater gifts,” after all. (I jest.)
As an aside, Reynolds often mentions the issue of access to the great works. If you were a young painter in England in the 18th century and unable to take the Grand Tour, the only access you had to Michelangelo et al. were engravings. Sobering to think about in our age of exquisite, high-res reproductions via Google Art Project, museum websites, etc.
The Discourses are easy to quote without context and mock. But considering the context and his aim, as well as the full range of ideas from I to XV, Reynolds holds up. He appreciated an apparent contradiction in the received notions about art and set out to preserve them by reconciling them. He did that by drawing distinctions between classes of art and arranging them in a kind of Platonic hierarchy with different criteria of judgement appropriate to their differing objectives. You can, of course, disagree with his presuppositions about Nature in General – as Hazlitt did in The Champion.
But Reynolds isn’t an unthinking reactionary to be skewered with pull quotes. He set out to give conservative, pedagogical discourses in keeping with the dignity and responsibilities of the Royal Academy. He didn’t deny the potential truth to be found in the then-unproven theories of his day, but he knew that it wasn’t the right context to be pushing those theories.
I’ve heard Coleridge and Reynolds accused of unwittingly kicking off the dissipation of art through endless prosaic theorizing. That may be true, but Reynolds seems to inveigh against that very kind of theorizing in his last discourses. He advocates for practical manuals of mechanical technique instead, and admits that artists aren’t the best at expressing ideas in words.
The main tension in Reynolds seems to be between rationalism and irrationalism, or supra-rationalism. Artists need (nay, must use!) rational principles in their work, but also intuition. For Reynolds, intuition is often called sentiment or feeling, but those are just vulgar terms for what is really a body of accumulated experience built by lifelong application of, yes, rational principles. These artistic impulses seem irrational, but they are actually supra-rational – transcending rationality while being wholly based on it.
I’m not convinced that these discourses fully reconciled the relationship of genius to craft.
It’s poignant that the final Discourse was given so close to the end of his life, in full knowledge that it would be his final oration at the Academy. Regardless of how you feel about his presuppositions, his death was a major loss for civil thought on the subject. Even aside from painting theory, Reynolds gives plenty of general advice on learning an artistic discipline.
I wish I’d read him before I started trying to write novels.
Reynolds agrees with Johnson that studying by inclination is best. Johnson elided a full idea, but Reynolds goes into greater detail by qualifying this advice as appropriate only for intermediate students who have been disciplined in the fundamentals of their pursuit and oriented toward the Good, True, and Beautiful. Assuming Johnson thought along the same lines as his fellow Club member, then, this sentiment is pretty far from the rubber stamp on autonomy that people want to make it.
Speaking of the Club, Reynolds describes artistic inspiration and borrowing in the same generational terms that Burke used to describe civil society in general. Maybe it has already been written, but there is clearly a book in the relationship of ideas between Club members. (And how natural law informed those ideas.)
Reynolds describes true wisdom as sensing one’s imperfection and having the humility to grasp collective observation. He takes it as obvious that the subject (Nature) is so complex that no one man can achieve a perfect perception through his own capabilities. Going back to the WCF, I wish that evangelicalism would understand this is just as true vis-a-vis systematic theology, confessions, and streams of Christian faith.
Reynolds’ hierarchical thinking is very classical and very impossible to imagine on this side of the Western democratic revolution. He perceives that all arts have a lower form and a higher form. The lower appeals to common taste and is judged correctly on verisimilitude to particular nature and. The higher form requires cultivated taste and is judged by the extent to which it transcends particular nature to achieve an imaginative vision of Nature in General – e.g. the perfect beauty of mythical Helen vs. the particular beauty of the artist’s model.
And speaking of taste – as the higher forms are artificial, and clearly not natural (e.g. opera or grand historic painting), it’s to be expected that people are not born with that taste. They’re born with the “seeds” of it, which must be ripened into cultivated, artificial taste. And to some extent you have to fake it until you make it. I’ve found this to be true about many things in life – the will to appreciate something precedes the appreciation, which does not invalidate the authenticity of the appreciation. We commonly understand this about whiskey and tobacco but our democratic, individualizing context makes us reluctant to admit it about art, music, literature, etc. “Eagerly desire the greater gifts,” after all. (I jest.)
As an aside, Reynolds often mentions the issue of access to the great works. If you were a young painter in England in the 18th century and unable to take the Grand Tour, the only access you had to Michelangelo et al. were engravings. Sobering to think about in our age of exquisite, high-res reproductions via Google Art Project, museum websites, etc.
The Discourses are easy to quote without context and mock. But considering the context and his aim, as well as the full range of ideas from I to XV, Reynolds holds up. He appreciated an apparent contradiction in the received notions about art and set out to preserve them by reconciling them. He did that by drawing distinctions between classes of art and arranging them in a kind of Platonic hierarchy with different criteria of judgement appropriate to their differing objectives. You can, of course, disagree with his presuppositions about Nature in General – as Hazlitt did in The Champion.
But Reynolds isn’t an unthinking reactionary to be skewered with pull quotes. He set out to give conservative, pedagogical discourses in keeping with the dignity and responsibilities of the Royal Academy. He didn’t deny the potential truth to be found in the then-unproven theories of his day, but he knew that it wasn’t the right context to be pushing those theories.
I’ve heard Coleridge and Reynolds accused of unwittingly kicking off the dissipation of art through endless prosaic theorizing. That may be true, but Reynolds seems to inveigh against that very kind of theorizing in his last discourses. He advocates for practical manuals of mechanical technique instead, and admits that artists aren’t the best at expressing ideas in words.
The main tension in Reynolds seems to be between rationalism and irrationalism, or supra-rationalism. Artists need (nay, must use!) rational principles in their work, but also intuition. For Reynolds, intuition is often called sentiment or feeling, but those are just vulgar terms for what is really a body of accumulated experience built by lifelong application of, yes, rational principles. These artistic impulses seem irrational, but they are actually supra-rational – transcending rationality while being wholly based on it.
I’m not convinced that these discourses fully reconciled the relationship of genius to craft.
It’s poignant that the final Discourse was given so close to the end of his life, in full knowledge that it would be his final oration at the Academy. Regardless of how you feel about his presuppositions, his death was a major loss for civil thought on the subject. Even aside from painting theory, Reynolds gives plenty of general advice on learning an artistic discipline.
I wish I’d read him before I started trying to write novels.
June 6, 2023
Joshua Reynolds was a great English painter in the 18th century. He was the first president of the Royal Academy of Arts, and presented 15 lectures to them that are called “Discourses” A lot of his lectures are an attempt on his part to elevate painting into the realm of a liberal art, like poetry. This makes sense given England’s fairly paltry record in visual art. Reynolds is constantly discussing great Italian, French and Flemish painters because no painters in England can really compare to them.
A lot of what Reynolds discusses are ways for English artists to be. He wants them to be better artists in a general, well-rounded sense. He writes in Discourse VII, “that a painter stands in need of more knowledge than is to be picked off his pallet, or collected by looking on his model, whether it be in life or in picture. He can never be a great artist, who is grossly illiterate.” Weirdly enough, Reynolds seems to hold poetry in higher esteem than he does painting.
His account of his recently deceased Thomas Gainsborough in Discourse XIV goes deep into understanding that painter’s weaknesses and strengths. He describes some of Gainsborough’s “scratches and marks” as having “a kind of magick” in the way they add up to a whole image. He repeatedly describes great painting as a combination of mimesis and poetry. In a letter to Samuel Johnson’s magazine, The Idler, Reynolds wrote, “If the excellency of a Painter consisted only in this kind of imitation, Painting must lose its rank, and be no longer considered as a liberal art, and sister to Poetry. “
His ideal is Michelangelo, whom he describes as the “exalted Founder and Father of Modern Art, of which he is not only the inventor, but which, by the divine energy of his own mind, he carried at once to its highest point of possible perfection.” This suggest that art has all been downhill since Michelangelo: “That the Art has been in a gradual state of decline, from the age of Michel Angelo to the present, must be acknowledged.”
A lot of what Reynolds discusses are ways for English artists to be. He wants them to be better artists in a general, well-rounded sense. He writes in Discourse VII, “that a painter stands in need of more knowledge than is to be picked off his pallet, or collected by looking on his model, whether it be in life or in picture. He can never be a great artist, who is grossly illiterate.” Weirdly enough, Reynolds seems to hold poetry in higher esteem than he does painting.
His account of his recently deceased Thomas Gainsborough in Discourse XIV goes deep into understanding that painter’s weaknesses and strengths. He describes some of Gainsborough’s “scratches and marks” as having “a kind of magick” in the way they add up to a whole image. He repeatedly describes great painting as a combination of mimesis and poetry. In a letter to Samuel Johnson’s magazine, The Idler, Reynolds wrote, “If the excellency of a Painter consisted only in this kind of imitation, Painting must lose its rank, and be no longer considered as a liberal art, and sister to Poetry. “
His ideal is Michelangelo, whom he describes as the “exalted Founder and Father of Modern Art, of which he is not only the inventor, but which, by the divine energy of his own mind, he carried at once to its highest point of possible perfection.” This suggest that art has all been downhill since Michelangelo: “That the Art has been in a gradual state of decline, from the age of Michel Angelo to the present, must be acknowledged.”
May 31, 2017
I've been dipping in and out of this book for almost a year now, and while it has been difficult to read at times I think it gives a fascinating insight into one of the most exciting times in British art history. The Discourses were written as lessons to young aspiring artists, which were delivered to students of the Royal Academy between 1769-1790. As one of the founders and the first president, Reynolds sought to raise the status of English art by educating through understanding art history and studying the old masters. These Discourses provide a portal into the mindset of the English Enlightenment, and lay out Reynolds's doctrinal ideas of what makes an artist of true genius.
June 5, 2010
Reynolds' view of aesthetics is fairly conventional for the mid to late eighteenth century (lots of Pope quoting going on), but I still found the collection of lectures to be an almost weirdly enjoyable read. Blake's annotations, though, are definitely a hoot. Dude did not like the SJR.
March 11, 2025
Sir Joshua Reynolds was the first President of the Royal Academy, and these fifteen discourses were delivered to the students of the Academy at the annual prize-giving ceremonies, between 1769 and 1790. The discourses are mostly about the studies which Reynolds recommends to students, but it also contains a certain theory of the nature of art and criticisms of the artists he recommends or does not recommend for imitation. They were influential in turning the attention of British artists from the Flemish and Dutch schools to the painters of the Italian Renaissance, particularly Michelangelo, Raphael, and Titian. Most importantly, they are a last protest of the Enlightenment against the rise of Romanticism, which began earlier in art than in literature or music. Since my temperament has always been more toward the Enlightenment than towards Romanticism, I found much in the discourses that I could agree with, although they also show some of the negative aspects which the Romantics were trying to correct. This is definitely a book that anyone interested in the arts should read.
March 13, 2022
Joshua Reynolds' ideas on art may seem like something to kill creativity of an individual but on a deeper reading, it is the way in which art should be taught to create individual artist from art school rather than workshop apprentices.
August 27, 2022
Rather outdated
December 13, 2023
Yeah I actually loved this. Don’t hate me cause you ain’t me.
Read
June 30, 2011There's some useful advice here, and some interesting points on various painters, although the appeal to social agreement ("the uniformity of sentiments among mankind") as the grounds of aesthetic good is a problem.
February 11, 2013
These discourses, though written in the 1770s, speak to many issues that modern artists face today. Covering advice about how to develop one's artistic talents to the role that art plays in society, Mr. Reynolds' voice remains relevant.
March 9, 2016
Don't have much to say about the book.
I read it because I thought it may be helpful as to an assignment. Yet I found the speeches addressed by the academicians of the RA very inspiring.
I think I love the book.
I read it because I thought it may be helpful as to an assignment. Yet I found the speeches addressed by the academicians of the RA very inspiring.
I think I love the book.
Want to read
January 4, 2017I registered a book at BookCrossing.com!
http://www.BookCrossing.com/journal/14346108
http://www.BookCrossing.com/journal/14346108
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews