The Artist as Collector: Sir Joshua Reynolds and his Collection of Art – Dr Donato Esposito

Dr Donato Esposito is an academic and a curator specializing in 18th and 19th century art, collecting and taste. From 1999 to 2004 he was a curator in the department of prints and drawings at the British Museum and in 2012 to 2013 he was the Andrew W Mellon Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Most importantly for us is that he curated the Tercentenary Exhibition of Reynolds at Plymouth, the Plymouth Box, and I do urge you that if you have any time in the next month or so you go down and see it because it is a simply wonderful collection, beautifully displayed and admirably curated. Anyway welcome to Kenwood, we're delighted to see you, looking forward to hearing your lecture. Thank you very much Angela for that warm introduction. I wish today to talk about an aspect of Reynolds, though very very well known, that is actually little known, little documented and little understood. Reynolds as an art collector and I put this cheeky slide up to sort of suggest that Reynolds might be revealing, he was quite a private man despite being well known during his lifetime, that his collection somehow reveals the private and the personal side of Reynolds in a way that other things that he did did not. So I show here one of my very favourite Reynolds's now in Dublin, the Earl of Belmont, recently on view at the V&A in the show about men and fashion, to show what a brilliant painter he was. He is nowadays often portrayed as a sort of experimenter and much is made of the fact that his paints faded and his surfaces terribly corroded and they have all sorts of conservation problems. But leaving all that aside, Reynolds was a great colourist. These robes, now pink, were, they are the robes of the Order of the Garter, were, no Order of the Bath I beg your pardon, they were red. So Reynolds did have problems with preservation but here is another great work that shows Reynolds was a great colourist and not all of his pictures, inverted commas, are wrecks. This is in Indianapolis, wonderful, wonderful work. But Reynolds's art collection, so to speak, creeps into lots of aspects of Reynolds's work and I'll touch on why he collected art throughout my talk but one very obvious way that his art collection influenced his practice was that he makes little insertions of things from his art collection. So we show here a great family group portrait in Birmingham, the Rothy family, and on the left we see here a vase. It might not look very much but it's identifiable and I'll come to that later. Really the story of Reynolds as an art collector in earnest begins when he moved into his grand house in Leicester Square, number 47. I show here an early view of Leicester Square some decades before Reynolds moved in. His house that he would move into was here, rather incongruously now where McDonald's and All Bar One is. Here is the Odeon and here is Leicester House, named after the Earl of Leicester, after whom Leicester Square is named. During Reynolds's time, and actually before and after this view, it was known as Leicester Fields and Reynolds moved in there in 1760 at the age of 37 and this is his house here in a late photograph, a decade or two before it was demolished. And we see, if we go back, these are the late 17th century houses that were built. So Reynolds moved into his house ready built. He wasn't, for example, like Leighton in Leighton House that I'm sure many of you will know, that which was built for him. Reynolds moved into a house that already existed, but he had it adapted for his use. And we might talk about that later. He had something built on at the back and at the top for his studio and it was here. So this was Reynolds's studio in the 20th century, not preserved as a museum. And we can already see that the buildings to the left and the right of the house have gone. And really by the time the decision was being thought about whether it would be preserved from demolition, the London County Council thought, well, it really doesn't survive as Reynolds would have known it. And also the neighbours on either side have gone and permission was given and it was demolished in 37. And here's a great drawing, not very well known, by Muirhead Bone in the Huntington in California, showing the house with all the windows removed in preparation for its demolition in 37. And we can see here, this was the reason why it was going to be demolished because the AA, the Automobile Association, wanted to expand their headquarters. And indeed, that's what Reynolds's house was demolished to build, Farnham House. There are lots of things that survive. So the house doesn't survive, but there are lots of things that do survive. And I show here sort of just for fun, Reynolds's great, great, great, great, great, great nephew still is alive. I know him. And he has, for example, lots of crockery, glassware, silverware, and I think furniture from Reynolds's house. And we see here a service from Worcester, I think, that Reynolds commissioned. And if you look very carefully in the middle of each plate and dish, Reynolds's initials, Joshua and Reynolds, all overlaid to sort of make an abstract shape. And that was done on commission for Reynolds. So I said that the story of Reynolds as an art collector begins when he moved into his grand house at the age of 37 in 1760, some years before he helped found the Royal Academy. But really, the story can be traced a little bit further back still to when he was a student, a pupil of Thomas Hudson, a fellow Devonian. And the reason why the story begins there is, as a teenager, Reynolds was apprenticed to him. And one of the things Reynolds was made to do was to go to auctions, bid, and collect lots that Hudson bid on. And this is one of the drawings that Hudson owned. And you can see, sort of quite obviously, I'm afraid, that Hudson and Reynolds, being portrait painters, were obviously going to be interested in portrait drawings, portrait prints, and portrait paintings. So this is an example of something by Rubens, a great favourite of Reynolds and Hudson, that Hudson owned. So Reynolds is a teenager coming from, actually, a fairly ordinary middle class family, one would say now. His father was a schoolteacher, went to Oxford, was the vicar of the local school. So by the standards of the day, actually quite well educated, but not very grand, not aristocratic. And Reynolds was not a child genius. So he learned the craft of painting and art collecting and looking at old masters and looking at pictures with Hudson in London. Remember, of course, at this time, there were no public museums and no public galleries. So basically artists, or anyone else, if you wanted pictures, you had to get them yourself. So Reynolds was with Hudson for two or three years. He left, went back to Plymouth. And the great thing that happened in Reynolds's life that he went to Italy for two years. So from 1750 to 52, Reynolds was based in Rome. And there, in a letter, he said it was the happiest place on earth. He saw the great works of Michelangelo and Raphael, the two great heroes of him and 18th century art history in Europe. And I show here a copy after Raphael, but Reynolds owned lots of real Raphaels. So when Reynolds returned to London, he began to collect in a great way, things that reminded him of his time in Rome. Here's another great drawing, Batista Franco, another great graphic artist that Reynolds was a favourite of. This wasn't owned by Hudson. And Reynolds also, despite him being quite serious, and he did actually have a sense of humour, and he had lots of satirical work, both poking fun at the art of painting and sort of funny caricatures. And here's a great drawing by Carlo Maratti, who Reynolds would revere as a great founder of the academic tradition in Rome, in 17th century Italy. Maratti was very, very famous, almost more famous than Raphael in 18th century London. And Reynolds and lots of his contemporaries owned lots of Marattis. It's a bit hard to see. There's Reynolds's mark. I'll come to that in a moment. Here is another mark of Rimsdyke, another 18th century collector in London. And again, just for fun, when I was a fellow in New York, there were lots of allegories of America in America, which obviously is where they should go, I suppose. Here's another great drawing by Carlo Maratti, four parts of the world. And here, not very in tune with today's thinking, is the personification of America as a feathered person with a feathered headdress. Now, lots of things that Reynolds owned are not now what he thought they were. And this can cause problems in trying to trace pictures. Here is a case in point. Here is a beautiful picture, which Reynolds would have thought of as a Rubens. This is owned by the barber in Birmingham. It's now attributed to one of his pupils. But on the back, very interestingly, Reynolds wrote these lines, and I'll quote them here. Rubens, his wife, painted in order to be introduced with her son in a large picture of fruit in the possession of Lord Bute. And this is the picture that Reynolds was referring to. So, here is the study that Reynolds owned. Here is, he thought it was Rubens' wife and their son. So, Reynolds obviously had a very large and extensive knowledge of art history, as he should. And he could remember, and he often jots down, as we've seen on paintings and drawings, who owned them, who owned the relevant picture, who owned a similar drawing, and what happened to them. I may give the impression that Reynolds sort of, you know, hoovered up anything that he wanted. Oh, we'll come to that in a moment. Here is another great Rubens in Florida. I've not been to this museum, but I want to one day, to give you another example of, this was owned by Reynolds, not Hudson, to give you an example of the kinds of things that would have decorated Reynolds' home. Very frustratingly, reconstructing his art collection is not straightforward, because there is no inventory, and there's not a single image of the interior of Reynolds' house. So, we don't quite know how he arranged his art collection. There is the odd reference to a picture being above a fireplace, or a picture being by the door, but we don't have any views of his home. And because it doesn't survive, it's maddeningly frustrating to work out where these pictures were. Here is another little Rubens, now in a private collection that Reynolds owned, for which we do have a much later view. So, there is the little Rubens that Reynolds owned. And of course, Reynolds lived before photography, but we don't have any views. So, this sort of thing that we'd love to have of Reynolds' house, we simply don't. Now, some of Reynolds' pictures survive. They're in museums, or they're in private collections, and we know about them. Some of the pictures he owned do not survive, and are missing. Here is a lovely colour engraving of a Rubens that Reynolds owned, that's now missing. Reynolds was very keen, as he should be, being head of the Royal Academy, to promote young artists, and to give them access to his collection. The young Turner remembers, as a teenager, meeting the very elderly Reynolds, and being allowed, with other students, to visit Reynolds' home in the 1790s. Reynolds gave ready access to printmakers, including Caroline Watson here, who he allowed to engrave his works for a wider public. And rather unusually, he also allowed his name to be put on the plate. So, he wasn't hiding what he owned. And here we have, in the collection of Sir Joshua Reynolds, engraved very elaborately on this plate. He owned Rubens, as I've said, in lots of forms, as paintings, as drawings, and as prints. This is one of the very few etchings that Rubens did. Reynolds had an enormous collection of prints, many, many thousands, and here is one of them in Boston, the MFA. Reynolds also owned lots of Rembrandt, and I'm afraid we're only going to touch on him today. But one of the things that's been recently discovered, this is a painting in Berlin, is that Reynolds repaired, shall we say, some of the pictures that he owned. And this picture in Berlin has been the subject of recent conservation, and has revealed that a lot of it may be actually by Reynolds painting over the work of Rembrandt. This is a bit of a controversial view. Some art historians simply can't believe that this is true. I'm not quite sure what to make, but all this here has been extensively retouched. And again, at this time, as well as having no museums and art galleries, there were no such thing really as art conservators. Painters themselves were the beacons of knowledge, and Reynolds had a go at touching up his pictures that he owned. And Benjamin West did this, and lots of other artists did this. It's now obviously considered not the done thing, but at the time, they genuinely were trying to repair a crack or a tear, or make it somehow more presentable. I don't think there was any ulterior motive for doing it other than appearance. Now, Reynolds's art collection was so extensive that he often owned many drawings for pictures that he also owned. He owned drawings that were studies for prints that he owned. He owned prints after paintings that he owned. So it really was a veritable museum. You could study the thought process right through from beginning to end. And here is a great drawing now in the British Museum, owned by Reynolds, by Rembrandt. And what's curious, it's a bit hard to see, but this drawing is actually made up of about 16 pieces of paper that have been torn up by Rembrandt, put together and repainted and reworked. And we know this because this drawing was owned by one of Reynolds's great rivals in the collecting world, Jonathan Richardson, the elder. And on the back, he tells us very elaborately that this drawing is made up of all these little bits of torn paper. And so in a way, this drawing, beyond being a drawing by Rembrandt, is a sort of relic of this great man, Rembrandt, revealing how he thought about drawing. And by tearing up this drawing into 17 bits and then reworking it, artists were very interested in how artists of the past got to where they were, how they painted, how they drew, how they thought about painting. And this is the painting, there we are, that it's a study for, which Reynolds also owned. So under his roof, he could have the whole process sort of from beginning to end, as it were, of many, many artists. And this is just one example. Now, I have a background in graphic art. And so my primary interest and where I throw a lot of my energy towards is reconstructing Reynolds's graphic art collection. Now, when Reynolds died, he had no family and he didn't marry, didn't have any children. And he left everything, he left a few pictures to close friends, but basically everything was left to his favourite niece, Mary Palmer, later the Marchioness of Tomand. She was very grand. And she had a big sale. And this is the frontispiece of the sale. And it's where I got my quote from there. Where's it gone? Care, taste and judgment. There it is, care, taste and judgment. There was a big sale and everything that Reynolds owned, this was at Phillips in London. He had a big sale and everything that he owned in the prints and drawings world was stamped either on the front or on the back with his mark. And here is a reproduction of the mark there. It's actually a very bad reproduction because the mark doesn't really look like that at all. It's actually more like the one here. It's in a square, not a rectangle. And that presents its own issues, which I'm afraid we don't have time to talk about today. But he had three executors, only two of which are on the frontispiece because one of them, Boswell, had died by the time the sale happened. So Reynolds died in 1792 and the sales didn't happen till the end of the 90s. And this sale, big sale, 18 days, was in 1798 at Phillips. Apart from having the stamp, which actually doesn't look like the stamp that is reproduced on the frontispiece, I've worked out that the stamping of his collection was done in a great hurry and with not much care. There either was too much ink, so we have bleeding here, the letters sort of merge into a lump, or the stamp wasn't allowed to dry properly. So here we have the mark that's completely blurred because someone who was doing the stamping didn't allow it to dry properly. And sometimes there wasn't enough ink, so the drawing or the print is stamped twice, sometimes even more than twice. So it was done in a great hurry. Why that was, I haven't quite worked out. The other thing that got the stamp, this stamp, was Reynolds's books, which is very handy. That's one of the aspects that I'm sort of leaving to the end, because libraries tend not to record the former owners of books. They're only really interested in the author and the subjects, of course. But Reynolds's books were also stamped with this mark. And a few years ago, I saw at Christie's, Reynolds's compass, his squares and his sort of wooden instruments, and they were also stamped with this mark, which is quite remarkable. So it seems that everything Reynolds owned that was small and portable got this stamp. Now, sorry, this is where I was coming to. I gave the impression that Reynolds could have whatever he wanted, but this was a lovely example I found during my time in New York of something that he wanted to have. And even being the great man that he was, the owner wouldn't let him have it. Here is a drawing workshop of Rubens, done with his vitality of his workshop. But curiously for us is this label, which amazingly has survived on the back of the modern mount, describing how this drawing was owned by Jonathan Richardson. And then he went to another seller and Reynolds was desperate to have it, but the owner wouldn't let Reynolds have it. Reynolds died and then the owner, and then it passed through and it came to this person called George Wilson, who I don't know who he is. So Reynolds didn't always get everything he wanted. I just wanted to put that out there to suggest that there must have been many things that Reynolds coveted that he simply couldn't have. This is one of the most famous drawings that Reynolds owned, this famous drawing of Adam for the fresco on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. So Reynolds did own very famous things by very famous artists, and this is one of them, his drawing of Adam. Now this drawing doesn't have Reynolds's mark. In fact, it has no marks on it at all, which is remarkable when you think about such a famous sheet. Why is it not marked and how do we know Reynolds owned it if it doesn't have the mark? Well, this is where there is no inventory, there is no list of what he owned, but by degrees one can work out what he formerly had in his possession. And this is a drawing that was engraved in the early 19th century by William Young Otley, another voracious collector of graphic art. And he engraved it in a book he wrote about Italian art, listing the illustrious owners that owned this drawing, including Reynolds. And this drawing is badly damaged. It's very faded because it's so famous. It's been exhibited a lot. And I think it had damage. And you can see, especially, well, on all the sides, it's been heavily trimmed. So during its long life of being coveted, it was exhibited a lot, which accounts for the drawing being not in great condition. And also, for whatever reason, it was torn or there was a tear. It was repaired by being trimmed, which again, doesn't sound like the kind of thing we do now. But that was the only way to stop a tear growing and growing. It was trimmed. But this belonged to Reynolds. He also, of course, owned lots of drawings by the Caracci. I say, of course, because Reynolds would have known that they ran a very famous and important drawing academy in 17th century Bologna. And there was a lot of the Caracci. There was Annibale, Ludovico, Annibale. They're all cousins or brothers. But what's interesting here is it's a life drawing. It's a drawing drawn from the life. And here we can see the model is holding onto a rope. So this is absolutely a life drawing done from the live model. It's a difficult pose. So to help him, models were either posed on wooden blocks or holding rope or holding sticks so that they could help them hold their pose for a long time. And there we can see the Reynolds mark at the bottom. Reynolds also owned drawings that have no sort of didactic purpose. He never used them in his art. They didn't tell you anything about art practice. They were in themselves simply beautiful. And here is a lovely example of a metal point, a type of drawing done on pink prepared paper, now in Hamburg. And a metal point is a type of drawing made with a metal point. It can be silver, and they're called silver points. It can be lead, and they're called lead points. It can be gold, and they're called gold points. But we call them all metal points. And they leave a very thin trace of the metal, a very sort of ghostly image from the point of the metal. And then it's reworked in white body colour to heighten it. And this drawing is on pink prepared paper. And by that, I mean that the drawing is not pink. It was made to be pink. And you can see that an assistant of Lippy's would have prepared this sheet. And you can see the striations of the wash going over the sheet. And here's the downward stroke to prepare the sheet for this metal point drawing. And metal points come in lots of colours, blue, peach, olive, all sorts of colours. And they were done as academic exercises very early on in the Renaissance as exemplars of drawing. They were kept, and students in these ateliers copied them. The master would do the master drawing, and artists would copy them. And Raphael and Leonardo excelled at these metal points. And Reynolds had drawings by all those artists. Reynolds also owned, again touching on the theme of portraits, obviously he was very interested in facial features and portraiture. Here we have a drawing by a German artist, Hans Birkmeyer. German art at the time, in Reynolds's time, was very little appreciated and very little collected generally, generally. Italian and French art and Dutch and Flemish were the exemplars. German art was right at the bottom. But Reynolds did own some examples, certainly prints and drawings, I don't know about paintings by Durer and other famous artists. But here is a drawing that survives now in Oxford, a German Renaissance portrait that Reynolds would obviously have been very interested in. Reynolds collected across the span of graphic art from the very beginnings in the 15th century, right up to his contemporaries and living artists. And here is an engraving, a bit hard to see, but you'll have to take my word for it. It's printed in blue ink. And this came to Plymouth some 15 years ago for a show I co-curated, which partly looked at Reynolds as an art collector. And this engraving has the Reynolds stamp on the back, because things that were valued highly were stamped on the front, and things that were valued lowly were stamped on the back. And at the time, early Renaissance art was not generally valued very highly. So names like Botticelli, for example, is not in the literature, was not collected, and was very little known. And they were called the primitives because they thought that these artists were sort of crude, and really it's the high Renaissance that you wanted to collect. But Reynolds nonetheless owned examples that he had the whole span. Here is a contemporary example of art that he owned by his female colleague, female founder of the Royal Academy, Angelica Kaufman. And I'm pleased to say her delayed COVID show opens next spring at the Royal Academy. So Reynolds owned lots of work by his own contemporaries, Gainsborough, even his arch rival, Hogarth. And here we have a nice example by Angelica Kaufman, an etching by her, now in the British Museum. Here is another one of the Caraccis that I mentioned, Ludovico Caracci. And here is a drawing for perhaps a mirror frame or a picture frame. And again, wouldn't have any obvious uses by Reynolds, but Reynolds collected beautiful drawings for their own sake. He also, obviously being head of the academic system in Britain, was very interested in the academic systems of Italy that had long established academies before the Royal Academies in Britain had been founded. And here is an engraving of an altarpiece very famous by Guido Reni, another artist that almost was as famous as Raphael and Michelangelo in the 18th century with Carlo Moratti. Guido Reni, now little known, but a brilliant painter and a brilliant draftsman. And here is an engraving after one of his most famous pictures of an altarpiece, which I saw some years ago, still there in a church in Genoa. Reynolds's art collection continues to enter museums, even in the past decade. And here is an example of a drawing that Birmingham bought, The Barber. Remember I showed you the supposed Rubens's wife, that they owned that, and they bought this in 2016. The Barber teaches music and art at Birmingham, so they thought it'd be rather fun to have this drawing, and they bought this in 2016. Another aspect, which I'm afraid we won't have time to look at, was Reynolds also collected a lot of drawings by Venetian artists. He owned lots and lots, dozens and dozens by Tintoretto. And here is one, also in The Barber, which they bought as part of their founding collection in 1936. Now apart from prints and drawings and books having the stamp, it's all very well and good, but actually the stamp itself can tell us lots of information beyond that Reynolds owned something or not. Now here is a drawing in the V&A Museum by Giacomo Tintoretto, and I'm showing you two very small details that tell us something about the ownership before, during, and after Reynolds. On the left, we can see Reynolds's mark. It's stamped deliberately straddling the sheet and the mount. So this is the drawing, this is the edge of the sheet, and there's the mark on the mount underneath the drawing. So this mount must have existed before Reynolds owned the drawing, because otherwise it wouldn't have the surviving fragment of his mark. We can also see that there's a trace just on one edge of a framing line in pen and black ink, sorry, pen and brown ink, and this framing line is also underneath Reynolds's mark. So this drawing by Tintoretto must have been framed in pen and ink by a collector and mounted before Reynolds owned it. This collector, the people that work on Italian art, wrote on a drawing, again this is a practice not frowned upon now, which one would never do, but collectors used to write on the drawing who they thought the drawing was by. So here, Giacoppo, I think is the Venetian way, but the Italian with a G, very unusual. This collector wrote Giulio Tintoretto on the sheet. Now the sheet is very damaged. You can see the edge, it's torn here. So whoever this collector is, and we don't know who it is, this collector must have, this repair must have existed before this Tintoretto inscription was written, annotation I should say, not inscription, before this was written on the sheet. So this collector, I think, is the collector that was responsible for repairing the drawing. So this is the drawing, this is the tear, and this is the repair. And all this was done before the owner wrote the attribution and the mount. So a bit of a long-winded way of saying that the mark itself tells us actually a lot about the history of the drawing, who owned it, its history of itself being repaired, and who owned it before. Now another thing that Reynolds did, again a practice not done now, is that Reynolds used to write on his prints as an aide-memoire. So here we have an etching after Rubens that Reynolds has coloured in. Reynolds was in Italy for two years, he never returned, but later in life he made more than one trip to the Low Countries, especially going to see pictures by his great favourite Rubens. And this picture is very special because Rubens painted it himself for Rubens's own mortuary chapel in Antwerp. And here Rubens has inserted himself as a little self-portrait. So obviously an artist that adores Rubens would go and seek out this altarpiece that Rubens himself painted very poignantly for when he died to decorate his own mortuary chapel. Reynolds went to see it and he coloured in this engraving which is in black and white obviously. All this work here, this is wash, this is chalk, is Reynolds. So it's almost a drawing by Reynolds and in fact the British Museum placed this item as a drawing by Reynolds. And also just for extra good measure, Reynolds wrote on the bottom of this engraving, sorry etching, virgin cloak blue. So he's writing to himself to remind him what the colours are, because again there were no colour reproductions really of artworks at this time. So artists would make a note. And this is a very special document recording Reynolds's visit to Holland and his thoughts, going to see Rubens, coming back home to Britain and recording the colour scheme, which obviously he couldn't record in any other way other than doing an oil sketch, but one is not known by Reynolds. And to add an extra layer of poignancy, it's very hard to see, there's a little mark here, TL, and that's the mark of Sir Thomas Lawrence who followed Reynolds as a president of the Royal Academy and he also was a great, great art collector. And not me, but someone else can reconstruct his art collection. For Lawrence, one has slightly an easier time because there is an inventory and a list of what he owned. But what makes, if you are going to follow Lawrence's art collection, for prints it was a TL in black ink, but for drawings, Lawrence was sort of conscious that he can't have all these great drawings stamped with everyone's collector's mark. So his collector's mark is blind, TL, but it's not inked, it's just embossed. And sometimes through conservation, this TL, the drawing has been pressed and the mark has gone, and it's always bottom left, always look bottom left, TL, blind. So whoever reconstructs his collection will have a fun time. Here is another drawing by Parma Giannino, a great draftsman. Here is what I was trying to explain that here is Peter Lely, the PL, the JR for Jonathan Richardson. Underneath here is another JR for Jonathan Richardson's son, also called Jonathan Richardson. And this is the Reynolds mark. So this is the kind of thing I want to show you to show that a famous drawing such as this had lots of marks. And for whatever reason, the Adam by Michelangelo, the drawing has been cut and all these marks have gone. Now, this is a drawing by Parma Giannino, and it records lots of things. I mean, lots of layers. So this is a drawing by Parma Giannino after an engraving by Marc Antonio Raimondi, after a model of a print supplied by Raphael for the Massacre of the Innocents. There is no painting of the Massacre of the Innocents. Raphael made a drawing specifically to be engraved by Marc Antonio, and Parma Giannino wanted to record a tiny aspect of this dead baby, Herod's killing all the children, hoping to get Christ. And Parma Giannino has extracted this tiny portion of the engraving, and Reynolds and lots of other artists, as we've seen, owned this drawing. So it's a Parma Giannino drawing, but it also references Raphael in a very, very famous engraving, and Reynolds, of course, owned the Massacre of the Innocents himself. So again, it's another example of Reynolds having a drawing and other aspects which would fill out the story, and he owned the engraving by Marc Antonio. Some of you in the audience will remember this drawing when it was shown here at Kenwood 45 years ago in 1978 at the exhibition of Reynolds' master, Thomas Hudson. It's a bit hard to see, but there is the TH for Thomas Hudson, and there is the mark of Reynolds upside down, and I'll come to that in a moment. So this is another drawing. I love Carlo Moratti, so I don't need to explain why. Reynolds adored Moratti, and here is a drawing that has a very obvious use by Reynolds. So Reynolds collected drawings both as examples of beautiful art. He collected them for teaching and didactic purposes, but he also collected drawings for use in his art, inverted commas, and here is the very obvious use that's not me, but someone else has worked out that Reynolds made of this drawing. This very beautiful and unusual painting by Reynolds, very recently on view at the Burt Morisot show at Dulwich, because Burt Morisot said that this painting, which was then in the National Gallery, now in the Tate Transfer, was one of her favourites. And here we have, it's a portrait of a little girl shown in different views, and I think it's, I don't need to be convinced, that Reynolds was inspired by this drawing, which he owned and which he would have seen even before he owned it when Hudson saw it when he was a teenager. So Reynolds obviously had that memory of that drawing very much in his head. Other examples of quotations we can say that Reynolds made of his art collection into his own practice is this great etching, again Guido Rini with Moratti, very, very famous in 18th century London. Here is a glory of angels, and I think this, perhaps not this exact etching, but this sort of etching would have inspired Reynolds in this great full length of Elizabeth Billington now in Canada. I said I'd come back to this portrait, and I am. Here is the portrait of the Roffey family in Birmingham with the vase, and here is the vase that Reynolds inserted into that picture. It's not any old vase, it's this one. And unfortunately, I haven't found the actual example, the actual impression that Reynolds owned. That's why I've called it surrogate, but that's the print that Reynolds would have owned and put into this picture. So Reynolds had a set of these vases. They're broken up. Some are in the V&A, some are in Glasgow in the Hunterian, but Reynolds obviously loved these vases and put them in lots of his pictures, and I'll show you here just two examples, one in Amherst in America and one in Belfast in Northern Ireland, showing you that Reynolds loved to insert these vases as evidence of the sitter's erudition and classical learning and education. And I end with a great quote by Reynolds, because earlier on I showed that Reynolds had a portrait that he believed was by Rubens and he wrote on the back of it. And so literally, these pictures would have decorated Reynolds' home. We don't have a view of the inside of the home, but Reynolds was very conscious of the intellectual prowess that he wanted to impart on art in Britain in the founding of the Royal Academy. He wanted to raise art from mere a craft face painting, it was called at the time, to an intellectual higher pursuit. And of course, to do this, one had to have mental capacity. And so Reynolds, and I wasn't being unkind when I said Reynolds was not a child genius, there is now a view, has its origins in lots of things, and William Blake was very unkind to Reynolds in suggesting that he was a bore and that he thought about art too much, actually. But Reynolds wanted to imbue art with intellectual prowess and he wanted artists to be intellectuals as well as craftsmen, as painters. And so I end my lecture with this great quote, a room hung with pictures is a room hung with thoughts. And in the ongoing process of reconstructing Reynolds's art collection, prints, drawings, books and paintings, I hope to reveal something of the man beyond the famous image that we have, which he himself promoted as this grand authoritarian figurehead, commanding respect and authority. But actually Reynolds had a very private side, a very hidden side. I hope that by looking at his art collection, that a hidden aspect has been brought to life for us to enjoy and explore further. Thank you very much.