Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Joshua Reynolds
British (English); 18th-century
St. Louis, MO: Saint Louis Art Museum
63%
John Julius Angerstein. 1765. Oil on canvas
Where this portrait manages to become just a little bit more than itself — in the coquettish top of that column at right, which comes to a point beneath the wrist; in the celerity of Reynolds's brush during the accenting whites that stream down his sitter's get-up, which is otherwise rock-firm — it proves that there might actually be something there, aesthetically, in the mannered propriety of old English painting. But then, it's not so much in that propriety as in spite of it: the errant marks of white on the subject's right shoulder and at the edge of his bicep, the liminality of that finger of his that's pointing downwards, seem to be accidents taking place well outside of the rectitude that's all over and around Angerstein's well-painted face — and that rectitude is what this painting's about. It's not that it's artistically bad, the uprightness, just that it's cocky and limiting. Reynolds seems to have known (or so he thought he knew) precisely what a painting was: a smooth and glistening surface with an image on it that's balanced and dark, and that glows enough to make it seem exalting. But what's good about this portrait is its bridled chaos, its minor failures to exalt which become instances, simply, of painting. (TFS, 2025)