father was professor at Oxford University
apprentice to Thomas Hudson (1740-43, London); St Martin’s Lane Academy (1750s, London)
1753 - moves to London as portrait painter
1760 - exhibits 4 portraits at Society of Artists exhibition (England’s first public art exhibition)
1762 - founds Literary Club
1766 - Society of Dilettanti member
1768 - Royal Academy of Art co-founder; first president
1769 - knighted by George III; appointed official painter to Society of Dilettanti; gives first “Discourse” lecture at RA
1773 - elected mayor of Plympton
1775 - elected to Florence (Italy) Academy
1778 - Discourses published
1784 - appointed 1st Painter to George III (King of England)
1786 - John Boydell commissions 3 paintings for Shakespeare Gallery
Rome (1750-52), Paris (1768, 1771), The Netherlands (1781)
George III (King of England), Catherine the Great (Empress of Russia), John Boydell
Commodore the Honourable Augustus Keppel, 1749 (National Maritime Museum, London)
Parody of the School of Athens, 1751 (National Gallery, Dublin)
Captain Robert Orme, 1756 (National Gallery, London)
David Garrick between Tragedy and Comedy, 1762 (private collection)
Lady Elizabeth Delmé and her Children, 1777-79 (National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC)
Infant Hercules Strangeling Serpents, 1788 Royal Academy exhibition (Hermitage, St Petersburg)
Many of Reynolds’s paintings were engraved and sold as prints
Farington, Joseph. Memoirs of Sir Joshua Reynolds. London: Pallas Athene, 2005
Manning, David. Sir Joshua Reynolds: A Complete Catalogue of His Paintings. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000
Martin, Floyd W. “Sir Joshua Reynolds’s ‘Invention’: Intellectual Activity as a Foundation of Art,” Art Education, vol. 40, no. 6 (November 1987): 6-15
Postle, Martin. Sir Joshua Reynolds: the Subject Pictures. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995
Reynolds, Joshua. The Letters of Sir Joshua Reynolds, John Ingamells and John Edgecumbe, eds. New Haven, CT: Paul Mellon Center for British Art, 2000
Reynolds, Joshua. Seven Discourses on Art, 1769-76. Project Gutenberg (www.gutenberg.org)
Wendorf, Richard. Sir Joshua Reynolds: The Painter in Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996