The Artist as Intellectual: Joshua Reynolds’s Self-Portrait as President of the Royal Academy (1780)

18 June 2020
This is the fourth lecture in a six-part series, titled Georgian Provocations: Six Iconic Works of Art from Eighteenth-Century Britain.

This lecture is now available.

In 1780 as the Royal Academy opened its doors for the first time at prestigious new premises in Somerset House a new self-portrait of Sir Joshua Reynolds was unveiled to the public. In the portrait, in which Reynolds portrayed himself, dressed in his doctoral robes and cap, posed next to a bust of Michelangelo, served as a visual manifesto of his position as president of the Royal Academy and a leading arbiter of artistic taste and culture in Britain in the later eighteenth century. In this talk Martin Postle sets this iconic self-portrait in the context of Reynolds’s career as a whole, using the series of over thirty self-portraits that Reynolds produced over fifty years, between 1740 and 1790, to chart his development as an artist, writer and thinker.

Georgian Provocations: Six Iconic Works of Art from Eighteenth-Century Britain is a one-off summer Public Lecture Course, delivered online, which is designed to provide an accessible and stimulating introduction to the art of the period. In this series of six 30-minute lectures, the art-historians Mark Hallett and Martin Postle focus on seminal paintings from the Georgian era, and investigate their contents, contexts and impact. Doing so reveals many of the ideas and issues that coursed through British visual culture between the 1730s and the 1790s, and demonstrates the riches that continue to be gained from looking closely at the individual work of art.

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About the speaker

Martin’s role as Senior Research Fellow focuses upon the research and writing of a catalogue raisonné of the paintings of Joseph Wright of Derby, the organization of a series of annual conferences on the history of the British art trade, organizing and running PMC workshops and public lecture courses, teaching on the Centre’s Yale in London undergraduate courses, and chairing and introducing research events at the Centre. Prior to his present appointment in October 2021, Martin was Deputy Director for Grants and Publications at the Centre. Between 1998 and 2007 he worked at Tate as Senior Curator and Head of British Art to 1900.

Martin holds a PhD from Birkbeck College, University of London, an MA in British Romantic Art from the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, and a BA in Art History with History from the University of Nottingham. He is a Fellow of Society of Antiquaries, Trustee of Strawberry Hill House, The William Hogarth Trust, The Walpole Society, the De Laszlo Archive Trust, and Council member of the Attingham Trust. His research interests focus principally on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British Art, including portraiture, landscape, the history of art academies, and art in the country house.

Martin’s many publications include Sir Joshua Reynolds: The Subject Pictures (Cambridge University Press 1995), Gainsborough (Tate and Princeton University Press 2002), and, with David Mannings, Sir Joshua Reynolds: A Complete Catalogue of his Paintings (Yale University Press 2000). Among the exhibitions he has curated and co-curated are The Artist's Model: Its role in British Art from Lely to Etty (Kenwood and Nottingham 1991), Angels and Urchins: The Fancy Picture in 18th-Century British Art (Kenwood and Nottingham 1998), The Artist's Model: From Etty to Spencer (Kenwood, Nottingham and York 1999), Art of the Garden: The Garden in British Art, 1800 to the Present Day (Tate Britain, Belfast and Manchester 2004), Joshua Reynolds: The Creation of Celebrity (Tate Britain and Palazzo dei Diamanti, Ferrara 2005), Stanley Spencer and the English Garden (Compton Verney 2011), Johan Zoffany, RA: Society Observed (Yale Center for British Art and the Royal Academy of Arts, London 2011–2012), Richard Wilson and the Transformation of European Landscape Painting (Yale Center for British Art and the National Museum Wales, Cardiff 2014), George Stubbs: "All done from Nature" (MK Gallery, Milton Keynes and the Mauritshius, The Hague 2019–2020). Martin was commissioning editor and contributor to the major PMC research project, Art and the Country House, published online by the Centre in November 2020.