"Discourse #7" by Joshua Reynolds

Self-portrait of
Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792)

A big thank you to everyone who came to the library, including some new faces, on Monday night for a lively discussion of Sir Joshua Reynolds's "Discourse #7."  Several in the group took issue with Reynolds's belief that art should be beautiful and lofty.  Reynolds, a leading 18th-century British portrait painter, argues that although "All arts have means within them of applying themselves with success to the intellectual and sensitive parts of our natures," we ought to give preference to "him who represents the heroic arts and more dignified passions of man."

A superior work of art according to Reynolds is one that excites "ideas of grandeur, or raises and dignifies humanity, or in the words of a late poet [Oliver Goldsmith], makes the beholder learn to venerate himself as man."

Participants brought up that a more modern aesthetic holds, for example, Picasso's Guernica as a masterpiece, even though it lays bare human violence and tragedy.

Elias Waterhouse writes in his monograph on Reynolds (Reynolds, London: Phaidon, 1973) that Sir Joshua wanted his writings to be considered a a par with his paintings.  Discourse #7 was first delivered at an awards ceremony at the Royal Academy of Art, of which Reynolds was president, in the momentous year of  1776.

He begins the discourse by telling his artist audience "the industry I principally recommend is not the industry of the hands, but of the mind." How to cultivate the mind?  By making reading a "favorite recreation of leisure hours," and engaging in "conversation with learned and ingenious men." In fact, the great man of letters Samuel Johnson was one of Reynolds's favorite interlocutors. 

Ranging as it does across painting, sculpture, philosophy, prose literature, and poetry, the discourse can be read as a promo for the humanities as a source of personal enrichment and enlargement, and for intelligent conversation as a means of obtaining new insights about other people and ourselves.  Our discussion this week was a case in point.