Discover the life and work of Sir Joshua Reynolds with the National Trust

We're at Knoll House in Kent, which is one of several National Trust properties celebrating the 300th anniversary of Reynolds' birth this year. It's a great opportunity to share with visitors what was special about Reynolds in his own lifetime and why he's so rewarding to look at in the present day. I'm also here at Knoll but in the conservation studios and we're spending the Tercentenary celebrations for Reynolds' birth looking very closely at our Reynolds paintings. Reynolds rose from being the son of a minor Devon schoolmaster but by the end of his life he was the head of his profession as the first president of the Royal Academy, he was the King's painter and he was a very wealthy man who was the friend of the great and good of the time so not only the aristocracy and royalty but also the great authors, actors and musicians too. The paintings remain over time very important to their collections and restorers who looked after them subsequently paid much more attention to the lights which were easier to clean and tended to leave the darks untouched. It really throws them out of balance over time and that's something that we've been able to rectify and you can really see that with Teresa Robinson here and in contrast of course the Duke of Dorset is before conservation so that's yet to come. So what made Reynolds so distinctive and ultimately incredibly successful was his willingness to innovate. He increasingly began to experiment to try and work out what the secret of the old masters was and rather than understanding that these paintings looked the way they did because of time we see this incredible spurt of creativity and the legacy of that for conservators today is some challenges in the way his works appear but also how they've been treated in the past. Our paintings are often in their original frames and what's been exciting this week is that we've unframed the Duke of Dorset and discovered a really well-preserved, unfaded area of paint here. We don't know exactly what this means yet but it's going to be a real focus of interest. What's special about the National Trust collections of Reynolds's paint is that they're very often seen in their original 18th century positions and that allows us not only to see them how they were seen in the 18th century but also allows us to draw connections between Reynolds and the people who bought them. So a great example of these friendships between Reynolds and his patrons is the Duke of Dorset who we see here in about 1769 in his Duke of the Robes. Now Reynolds and the Duke of Dorset were friends for a period of about 20 years in the end and in that time the Duke bought many examples of Reynolds's art and not only portraiture but history paintings which conveyed scenes of the distant past and were seen as more ambitious than portraiture. Reynolds knew the sitter for a really long period of time so the Order of the Garter, which he wasn't awarded until around 20 years after the painting was originally created was probably added by either himself or assistants. So this little area here and then the blue paint there. We'd love for you to come and see the Tercentenary Conservation Projects for Yourself in context at Knoll, Petworth, Wimpole and Soltram. For more information go to the Tercentenary Reynolds webpage on the National Trust website.