sire that the last words I should pronounce in this academy and from this place might be the name of Michael Angelo.’ And these were the last words he pronounced there.
In the beginning of 1791 Reynolds paid visits to Burke at Beaconsfield, and Lord Ossory at Ampthill. He offered his collection of old masters to the Royal Academy at a very low price, and, on their refusal, exhibited them at a room in the Haymarket, with the view of disposing of them, but gave the profits of the exhibition to his old servant, Ralph Kirkley. In the catalogue, which he wrote himself, he called it ‘Ralph's Exhibition.’ He still attended the meetings of the academy, and was greatly interested in the erection of the monument to Johnson in St. Paul's Cathedral, offering to supply from his own purse any deficit (at that time equal to 300l.) in the subscriptions received. In May he sat for his portrait, for the last time, to the Swedish artist De Breda. His exertions for his friends were still constant. Boswell was appointed secretary of foreign correspondence to the academy, and Dr. Thomas Barnard [q. v.] (bishop of Killaloe) their chaplain; and in this year also the friends of Miss Burney, of whom Sir Joshua was one of the most active, procured her release from her office at court, which had much affected her health and spirits. She has left a touching account of two visits to him in his last illness, during which Boswell was a frequent visitor, and his niece, Miss Palmer, attended him with assiduous affection. About September 1791 his usual spirits began to give way under the apprehension of total blindness, and he began to suffer from loss of appetite, due probably to the disease which had begun to affect his liver, but was not discovered till a fortnight before his death. He died tranquilly and with little pain, between eight and nine o'clock on Thursday evening, 23 Feb. 1792, at his house in Leicester Fields.
Within a few hours of his death Burke wrote an obituary notice, in which the essential qualities of his character and his genius were set forth in words of singular truth and elegance. His executors were Burke, Malone, and Metcalfe, who proposed that the body should be removed to the academy, and that the funeral should proceed thence to St. Paul's. An objection, raised by Sir William Chambers, that the academy had no power to use their rooms for the purpose, was overruled by the king, and the night before the funeral the body lay in state in a portion of the model academy, which was hung with black and lighted with wax candles in silver sconces. He was buried in the crypt of St. Paul's on Saturday, 3 March, in a grave next to that of his friend, Bishop Newton, and near to that of Wren. The pall-bearers were the Dukes of Dorset, Leeds, and Portland, the Marquises Townshend and Abercorn, the Earls of Carlisle, Inchiquin, and Upper Ossory, Viscount Palmerston and Lord Eliot. The procession numbered ninety-one carriages, and the followers included the whole body of the academy and its students, and between fifty and sixty of the most distinguished men in England. The sense of loss extended to the throng. ‘Never,’ wrote Burke, ‘was a funeral of ceremony attended with so much sincere concern of all sorts of people.’ A monument in the cathedral was erected in 1813, designed by Flaxman and inscribed with a Latin epitaph by Payne Knight.
The bulk of his fortune was left to Miss Palmer, who inherited in all nearly 100,000l., and was this year (1792) married to the Earl of Inchiquin (afterwards Marquis of Thomond). He left Mrs. Gwatkin (Offy) 10,000l., and his own sister Frances 2,500l. for life, with reversion to Miss Palmer. To Edmund Burke he left 2,000l. besides cancelling a bond to the like amount; to the Earl of Upper Ossory and Lord Palmerston he left the choice of one of his pictures (the former chose the ‘Nymph and Boy’ or ‘Venus and Cupid,’ the latter ‘The Infant Academy’); to Sir Abraham Hume the choice of his Claudes; to Sir George Beaumont Sebastian Bourdon's ‘Return of the Ark’ (now in the National Gallery); and to the Duke of Portland his own picture of an ‘Angel and the Cross’ (the upper part of the ‘Nativity’). To Mason he left the celebrated miniature of Milton by Cooper; to Richard Burke, junior, another of Cromwell, by the same artist; to his nephew, William Johnson, his watch and seals; to Mrs. Bunbury the portrait of her son; to Mrs. Gwyn her own portrait; and 1,000l. to his old servant, Ralph Kirkley.
Reynolds was the greatest portrait-painter that England has produced, and one of the greatest painters of the world. Mr. Ruskin ranks him among the ‘seven supreme colourists,’ the others being Titian, Giorgione, Correggio, Tintoretto, Veronese, and Turner, and says: ‘Considered as a painter of individuality in the human form and mind, I think him, even as it is, the prince of portrait-painters. Titian paints nobler pictures and Vandyck had nobler subjects, but neither of them entered so subtly as Sir Joshua did into the minor varieties of human heart and temper’ (The Two Paths, Lect. 2). His chief defect was in his draughtsmanship of
