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JOSHUA REYNOLDS
Mrs Hartley as a Nymph with Young Bacchus (1772)
Oil on canvas, 89cm X 68.5cm/35in X 27in

The two main periods of Reynolds's life which influenced his painting technique were his apprenticeship with the portrait painter Thomas Hudson from 1740 to 1743 and his trip to Italy from 1749 to 1752. The latter profoundly affected the artist and, for most of his career, Reynolds used poses borrowed from Classical sculpture. Michelangelo, Correggio and Van Dyck, amongst others.

Unfortunately, Reynolds was neither a care-ful nor systematic painter and because of his consuming passion for experimentation with various pigments and media, few of his later works have survived in anything like their original condition. Within his lifetime, several pictures were returned to his studio for repair and many have clearly suffered from later unsuccessful attempts at restoration.

Reynolds's broad aim was to duplicate the effects of the Old Masters in the shortest possible time and, as conventional media were thought to dry too slowly in the damp British climate, he would add quantities of driers. From the notes he made in muddled Italian, we find that Reynolds, like Turner, was interested in the effects of wax as a medium. He would probably melt the wax and add spirits of produce a paste which could be mixed with colors ground in oil this relatively quick-setting paste would enable him to produce effects ranging from the boldest impasto to the thinnest glazes, depending on the quantity of diluent added. As well, he experimented with various media and varnishes, often recklessly super-imposing several media, each with a different drying rate within the same picture.

Reynolds was no less rash in his choice of pigments and would mix incompatible colors like orpiment and white lead or make use of recently invented but untested colors and 'fugitive' lakes and carmines.

His brushes were nineteen inches long, and his palette an outmoded type with a handle. Information regarding his choice of colors is contradictory and he himself wrote that 'four [colors] are sufficient to make every combi-nation required'. One source says he preferred carmine, ultramarine. Naples yellow and black. Another says that he chose white, Naples yellow, yellow ochre, vermilion, light red, lake, black and Prussian blue. In his notes, Reynolds called Prussian blue 'Turchino'.

The head in the picture suffers from serious craquelure perhaps due to Reynolds's use of 'white virgin wax' (bleached beeswax) which 'caused his colors to scale off from the canvas in flakes'. It seems that he melted the wax and then added colors ground in oil. He reportedly told one connoisseur 'Mix a little wax with your colors, and don't tell anybody.' A cross-section of the various layers of this picture indicate that Mrs Hartley's drapery was originally violet achieved by superimposing a lake glaze on top of blue, but apparently Reynolds changed his mind and applied a very thick layer of white to obliterate it. A thin layer of blue served as the shadow of a fold line, followed by a layer of orange-brown.

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