As a portrait painter was how the second of the great English masters of the 18th century, Joshua Reynolds, established himself, although he too strove more for the laurels of the historical painter. But neither in the strength of his national character nor in the originality of his genius can he be compared with Hogarth. The searching reflection was for Reynolds stronger than his natural temperament and thus it was only after a stay in Italy (1749-1752), where he studied all the great masters, that he truly found his way. Later, as the first President of the Royal Academy of Arts of which he was a co-founder, however strongly he recommended Raphael and Michelangelo as the greatest examples in his academic speeches, he himself paid no attention to these rules. He attached much less value to drawing and plastic modelling than to artistic appearance, and in order to make these as attractive as possible he united Titian with Correggio (1489-1534) and Van Dyck (1599-1641) with Rembrandt (1606-1669).

 

This explains why he received boundless applause from his fellow countrymen, and why he was deluged with commissions to paint portraits like no one before him. Of the 2000 pictures which he was said to have painted, over half were portraits which achieved their effect particularly through their colouristic charm and through the pleasing nature of the art, not through power or depth of characterisation. To many of his portraits he gave allegorical or mythological titles, such as the picture of children that found fame as The Age of Innocence.

 

Just how well Reynolds was able to hone in on the tastes of his contemporaries was shown by the demand for his historical and mythological pictures. A small Hercules with the Serpent was greeted with such acclaim that, after selling the original to Tsarina Catherine of Russia, he had to repeat the picture several times.

 

Thomas Gainsborough was a much more powerful and elemental nature than Reynolds, and clearly more credible as a portrait painter; he cared little or not at all for the old masters, but rather concerned himself so much more intensively with nature. Here, however, he saw not only the human beings but above all the scenery. For he was equally at home as a landscape painter as he was a portrait painter, so that he can be regarded with confidence as the founder of the English national school of landscape painting, for after all he not only derived his themes from his homeland but he also permeated it with a particularly poetic philosophy which has remained the basis of the sphere of English landscape painting.