At the time of George III’s accession to the throne of England, three artists who, together, inaugurate what has been entitled the Classical Age of Painting in Britain had reached maturity: in order of birth, Wilson, Reynolds and Gainsborough. It was the joint achievement of these painters to elevate both portraiture and landscape by assimilating the great style of the Old Masters to the native tradition. The older generation of Hogarth had humanized the English portrait and introduced a new vitality into landscape by its cult of “plein-air” naturalism. The three younger men built on these foundations by a pursuit of elevation which led two of them to study antiquity and the Old Masters in Rome with a discernment unmatched by their seniors and contemporaries. Reynolds returned from his Grand tour of Europe towards the end of 1752, Wilson probably in 1759. Certainly after his move to Bath, in 1759, and probably before, Gainsborough discovered his artistic hero in Van Dyck, his substitute for the Grand Tour and intermediary with the Old Masters tradition. He divides the honours of the elevation of English portraiture with Reynolds, those of English landscape with Wilson. When the Royal Academy was founded in 1768 the three stood head and shoulders over both the older men and their contemporaries who were appointed Foundation Members, for Allan Ramsay by this date was producing little besides copies of his Royal portraits and neither joined nor exhibited. The situation was very different at the time of their deaths, when they were surrounded by a galaxy of talent. “In painting portraits”, wrote Edmund Burke in his obituary of Reynolds, “he appeared not to be raised upon that platform, but to descend to it from a higher sphere”. This sums up in a nutshell the effect of his studies in Italy. The higher sphere from which he descended was the ideal world of antiquity and of the Renaissance, the...
