Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 8.djvu/93

SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS 253 this intelligence with the respectful concern due to the talents and virtues of their president, and either then did enter, or designed to enter, into a resolution honorable to all parties, namely, that a deputation from the whole body of the academy should wait upon him, and inform him of their wish, that the authority and privileges of the office of president might be his during his life, declaring their willingness to permit the performance of any of its duties which might be irksome to him by a deputy. From this period Sir Joshua, never painted more. The last effort of his pencil was the portrait of the honorable Charles James Fox, which was executed in his best style, and shows that his fancy, his imagination, an- his other great powers in the art which he professed, remained unabated to the end of his life. When the last touches were given to this picture, "The hand of Reynolds fell, to rise no more." On Thursday, February 23, 1792, the world was deprived of this amiable man and excellent artist, at the age of sixty-eight years ; a man than whom no one, according to Johnson, had passed through life with more observations of men and manners. The following character of him is said to be the production of Mr. Burke : " His illness was long, but borne with a mild and cheerful fortitude, without the least mixture of anything irritable or querulous, agreeably to the placid and even tenor of his whole life. He had, from the beginning of his malady, a distinct view of his dissolution, which he contemplated with that entire com- posure which nothing but the innocence, integrity, and usefulness of his life, and an unaffected submission to the will of Providence, could bestow. In this situa- tion he had every consolation from family tenderness, which his tenderness to his family had always merited. " Sir Joshua Reynolds was, on very many accounts, one of the most memo- rable men of his time ; he was the first Englishman who added the praise of the elegant arts to the other glories of his country. In taste, in grace, in facility, in happy invention, and in richness and harmony of coloring, he was equal to the great masters of the renowned ages. In portrait he went beyond them ; for he communicated to that branch of the art in which English artists are the most engaged, a variety, a fancy, and a dignity derived from the higher branches, which even those who professed them in a superior manner did not always pre- serve when they delineated individual nature. His portraits reminded the spec- tator of the invention of history and the amenity of landscape. In painting por- traits he appears not to be raised upon that platform, but to descend to it from a higher sphere. His paintings illustrate his lessons, and his lessons seem to be de- rived from his paintings. " He possessed the theory as perfectly as the practice of his art. . To be such a painter, he was a profound and penetrating philosopher. " In full happiness of foreign and domestic fame, admired by the expert in art, and by the learned in science, courted by the great, caressed by sovereign