He received twelve hundred guineas from the Duke of Rutland for the ‘Nativity.’
About seven hundred plates have been engraved after Reynolds, by McArdell, J. R. Smith, Valentine Green, J. Watson, T. Watson, E. Fisher, J. Dixon, R. Houston, W. Dickinson, J. Jones, G. Marchi, W. Sharp, Samuel Cousins, and others. Fine and rare proofs of these now fetch very large prices, in some cases exceeding those obtained by Reynolds for the pictures. In 1895 a proof of ‘Mrs. Pelham feeding Chickens,’ engraved by W. Dickinson, was sold at Christie's for 325l. 10s. A series of 350 small plates were published about 1825 by the engraver Samuel William Reynolds [q. v.] To these, from 1860 onwards, were added 270—plates after subjects not included in the first series; all these plates have been issued in a complete form by Messrs. Henry Graves & Co.
A perfect list of the works of Sir Joshua and the dates when they were painted has not hitherto , owing to the absence of his pocket-books. But his ledgers, in which he recorded the prices he received for his pictures from 1760 till his death, became the property of Mr. Algernon Graves, who has been long engaged, with Mr. W. V. Cronin, in preparing the complete work on the subject.
Frances Reynolds (1729–1807), the youngest sister of Sir Joshua, was born on 6 June 1729. She kept Sir Joshua's house for many years after he came to London, and employed herself in miniature and other painting. But her temperament was not congenial to her brother, and when her nieces, the Misses Palmer, were old enough to take her place, she (at a date not precisely recorded, but before 15 Feb. 1779) left his house for ever. Madame d'Arblay tells us that she was ‘a woman of worth and understanding but of a singular character,’ and that this singularity consisted in never knowing her own mind about anything, and in a tiresome fidgetiness which made her very difficult to live with. The separation from her brother caused her lasting regret. She felt, according to a draft of a letter found among her papers, that she had been ‘thrown out of the path nature had in a peculiar manner fitted’ (her) ‘for.’
After leaving her brother, who made her an allowance, she went first to Devonshire, and then, in 1768, to stay with a Miss Flint in Paris, where Reynolds visited her; she afterwards lived as a lodger of Dr. John Hoole [q. v.], whose portrait, prefixed to the first edition of his translation of Ariosto, was painted by her. Of her work as an artist there were different opinions. Sir Joshua, speaking of the copies which she made of his pictures, says ‘they make other people laugh and me cry;’ but a letter of Northcote's says that ‘she paints very fine, both history and portrait.’ Dr. Johnson, who was very fond of her, and visited her in Dover Street, where she was living by herself in 1780, was not pleased with the portrait she made of himself in 1783, and called it his ‘grimly ghost.’ Of her literary work he held a higher opinion, and he wrote of her ‘Essay on Taste’ (privately printed, 1784, 8vo): ‘There are in these few pages or remarks such a depth of penetration, such nicety of observation, as Locke or Pascal might be proud of.’ But he went further than this in his admiration for Miss Reynolds herself, for he thought her ‘very near to purity itself;’ and all his letters to her and about her show unfailing interest in his ‘Renny dear.’ He left her a book as a legacy. She printed a ‘Melancholy Tale’ in verse in 1790. On her brother's death she took a large house in Queen's Square, Westminster, where she exhibited her own works, and where she died, unmarried, on 1 Nov. 1807.
[Malone's Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds, 1797; Northcote's Life of Sir Joshua Reynolds; Beechey's Literary Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds; Farington's Life of Reynolds; Cotton's Sir Joshua Reynolds and his Works, Catalogues of Portraits by Sir J. R., and Notes and Observations on his Pictures; Cunningham's Lives (Heaton); Phillips's Sir Joshua Reynolds; Pilkington's Dict.; Bryan's Dict. (Graves and Armstrong); Nollekens and his Times; Walpole's Letters; Madame D'Arblay's Diary and Letters; Boswell's Life of Johnson; Mrs. Piozzi's Memoirs; Hazlitt's Conversations of Northcote; Forster's Life of Goldsmith; Catalogues of British Institution (1813), Winter Exhibitions of the Royal Academy, Reynolds's Exhibition at the Grosvenor Gallery (F. G. Stephens), Guelph Exhibition at New Gallery, and Loan Collections at South Kensington 1867 and 1868; Ruskin's Modern Painters, &c.; Hamilton's Catalogue of the engraved works of Sir Joshua Reynolds; information supplied by Sir Robert Edgcumbe and Mr. Algernon Graves.]
REYNOLDS, RICHARD (d. 1535), martyr, studied at Cambridge. It is certain that he was for some time at Christ's College, and it may be that he was elected fellow of Corpus Christi in 1510. The statement that he was university preacher in 1509 is doubtless due to some confusion. In 1513 he was admitted to the degree of B.D., without being bound to scholastic acts and residence, on the ground that he was about to enter the monastic order before St. Barnabas's day, and
