Robert Dodsley

Strongly lit from the side, the stalwart face of English poet, dramatist and publisher, Robert Dodsley (1703–64), emerges from the dark background. With a head and shoulders pose that alludes to the busts of classical sculpture, and a pen poised in response to a letter held in his left hand, the artist Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723–92) has portrayed Dodsley as a learned man of letters. To have been painted by Reynolds, the most successful artist of his time and founder of the Royal Academy of Arts, London, marks the high status that Dodsley had achieved in polite society. Starting out as a footman, his poems earnt him the patronage of duchesses and propelled him into the heart of the eighteenth-century literary circle. He became close friends with English writer Dr Samuel Johnson (1709–84) and was supported by writer Daniel Defoe (d. 1731) and poet Alexander Pope (1688–1744). He wrote several poems and plays, becoming a respected bookseller and publisher in his later years. This portrait was given to Dodsley by his friend, the poet William Shenstone (1714–63), in exchange for a portrait of Shenstone.

The faded and cracked appearance of the painting is not unusual in works by Reynolds. He was renowned for his experimental artistic practices, and the now ghostly flesh tones may be a result of his choice of the pigment red lake, or carmine, which fades over time. Cracking and darkening has also been caused by Reynolds’s use of bitumen, a phenomenon found across other paintings by him. His experiments with paint were partly driven by Reynolds’s pursuit of the so-called ‘Grand Manner’, an artistic style inspired by classical and Renaissance art, and his desire to imitate the aged effect of paintings by the ‘Old Masters’.