platform on which he took his stand the portraiture of the society. Reynolds chose for himself a composite style: a mixture between the great and the ornamental styles. He was aware of the difficulty of his task. As he confessed, the great style could not “happily be blended with the ornamental”, nor the dignity of Raphael with “the glow and bustle of a Paulo, or Tintoret”. To justify his own course of associating the ornamental with the great, he drew a distinction between heightening the elegant and degrading the sublime: “it happens in a few instances that the lower may be improved by borrowing from the grand”. When the union is accomplished in a high degree, portraiture “becomes in some sort a rival to that style which we have fixed as the highest”. The main groupings of Reynold’s portraiture are: naval and military heroes; civil worthies; actors and actresses; and children in fanciful roles. To a special class belong his portraits of those men of genius with whom he was personally intimate, and of whose characters he made written assessments. To cover adequately the range of his art we must add to the list his fancy pictures and history paintings as well as his short excursion into caricature. By the circumstances of his Devonian connection he had life-long contacts with naval men, whose portraits commence and continue the long line of heroicized likeness. The two devices that he used most frequently for elevation were the attitude borrowed from the antiquity or the Old Masters and the emotive background. Both appear in his full-lenght of “Captain the Hon. Augustus Keppel” at Greenwich, the portrait which tended most to establish his reputation after his return from Italy. The “Apollo Belvedere” pose, which he first used for a naval hero, was twice invoked to support a portrait from civil life. “Frederick, 5th Earl of Carl...
