To Look Like A Man of Business & Consequence - Sir Joshua Reynolds' Grand Tour Sketchbooks

For many artists who undertook the Grand Tour in the eighteenth-century making sketches and notes was an integral part of recording their journey. For Sir Joshua Reynolds this was no exception. During his Grand Tour (1749-1752), the art of sketching and note-taking was not only an important method in documenting his ideas and those things he wished to recall, but also the intellectual understandings he acquired from doing so. Certainly, the highly personalised, and at times, rather slight, abstruse, and indeterminate nature of the sketchbook sketches and notes form a type of self-portrait. They reveal a raw and vulnerable vision of the student-artist abroad, eagerly wanting “success” but uncertain whether it will be worthwhile and that he might return to England without the reputation of a good name. For Reynolds, it was by sketching and taking notes that he not only recorded artworks, scenes, and episodes from that time, but also what stimulated his imagination and intellect. His sketchbooks became the tool which transferred the moment of observation into something new, a creative, innovative seed, full of generalised possibilities and potential to qualify his mind from the artisan, journeyman face-painter to the intellectual, gentleman-artist. The following thesis will consider Reynolds’ nine surviving Grand Tour Sketchbooks to enable a greater understanding of the artist’s life during his time abroad. The sketchbooks provide a glimpse of the artist’s activities whilst also providing a record of a learning process of exploration and invention. For it was through sketching and note-taking, with all its liberté from the generalised subject, the transitory moment, the intuitive composition, and as a symbolic fragment of the determined whole, which reflects Reynolds’ personal response to what he saw. The sketchbooks represent the nucleus of the thesis not only because they are the primary material of his journey, bearing the literal marks of his hands and porte-crayon, but also because they are evidence of his diverse influences, aspirations, interests, and “unmethodical methodology” study. Therefore, the thesis will assess Reynolds’ artistic and personal development and the distinctive ways in which the contents reflect his learning and emerging connoisseurship. As one may imagine, such an assessment will suggest an alternate, more balanced, and perhaps contradictory understanding of the artist’s’ Grand Tour