Joshua Reynolds's “Nice Chymistry”: Action and Accident in the 1770s

Abstract

The first president of Britain's Royal Academy of Arts, Joshua Reynolds was described by contemporaries as a dangerously misguided chemist. Using a secretive laboratory of fugitive materials, he crafted visually striking images that came together quickly and stopped audiences dead in their tracks. But, just as rapidly, those paintings began to deteriorate as objects—flaking, discoloring, visibly altering in time. When framed around the “nice chymistry” he prescribed for aspiring artists in his famous Discourses, Reynolds's risky pictorial enterprise can be situated within a broader problematic of making and thinking with temporally evolving chemical images in the later eighteenth century.

Notes

1. See Benedict Nicholson, Joseph Wright of Derby: Painter of Light (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968), vol. 1, 3.

2. On the chronology of research on phosphorous, see Jan Golinski, “A Noble Spectacle: Phosphorous and the Public Cultures of Science in the Early Royal Society,” Isis 80, no. 1 (1989): 11–39.

3. For the detailed description and sketch of an alchemical laboratory that Burdett apparently made for Wright's painting, see Judy Egerton, Wright of Derby (London: Tate, 1990), 84–88. For a concise overview of alchemical iconography, see Lawrence Principe and Lloyd DeWitt, Transmutations—Alchemy in Art: Selected Works from the Eddleman and Fisher Collections at the Chemical Heritage Foundation (Philadelphia: Chemical Heritage Foundation, 2002).

4. See Martin Hopkinson, “Printmaking and Print Collectors in the North West 1760–1800,” in Joseph Wright of Derby in Liverpool, ed. Elizabeth E. Barker and Alex Kidson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 85–103. For a further account of Burdett's various aquatint processes, see idem, “Burdett, Wedgwood and Bentley,” Print Quarterly 25, no. 2 (June 2008): 132–46.

5. Quoted in Nicholson, Joseph Wright, vol. 1, 17–18.

6. David Fraser, “Joseph Wright of Derby and the Lunar Society: An Essay on the Artist's Connections with Science and Industry,” in Egerton, Wright of Derby, 15–23; Jenny Uglow, The Lunar Men: Five Friends Whose Curiosity Changed the World (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2002); and Rica Jones, “Wright of Derby's Techniques of Painting,” in Egerton, Wright of Derby, 263–71. Matthew Hargraves has also saliently pointed out to me the potential significance of the development of these chemical practices in the Society of Artists of Great Britain, an institution that (unlike the Royal Academy of Arts) offered pedagogy in chemistry and artists’ pigments from the early 1770s; see Hargraves, “Candidates for Fame”: The Society of Artists of Great Britain, 1760–1791 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), esp. 102–3.

7. See, for example, M. Kirby Talley, “‘All Good Pictures Crack’: Sir Joshua Reynolds's Practice and Studio,” in Reynolds, ed. Nicholas Penny (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1986), 55–70; Hélène Dubois, “‘Use a Little Wax with Your Colours, but Don't Tell Anybody’: Joshua Reynolds's Painting Experiments with Wax and His Sources,” Hamilton Kerr Institute Bulletin 3 (2000): 97–106; Rachel Morrison, “Mastic and Megilp in Reynolds's Lord Heathfield of Gibraltar: A Challenge for Conservation,” National Gallery Technical Bulletin 31 (2010): 112–28; and Helen Brett et al., “‘I Can See No Vermilion in Flesh’: Sir Joshua Reynolds’ Portrait of Francis Beckford and Suzanna Beckford, 1755–1756,” in Studying Old Master Paintings: Technology and Practice, ed. Marika Spring et al. (London: Archetype, 2011), 201–8.

8. Joyce Townsend, technical report, August 1998, conservation file of Tate Gallery, acc. no. 4505.

9. For this picture, see David Mannings and Martin Postle, Sir Joshua Reynolds: A Complete Catalogue of His Paintings (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 485–86.

10. “Report before Cleaning,” November 1947, conservation file of Tate Gallery, acc. no. 5750.

11. “Report on the Cleaning,” January–February 1948, conservation file of Tate Gallery, acc. no. 5750. On the supposed frailties of Reynolds's drawing, see Luke Hermann, “The Drawings by Sir Joshua Reynolds in the Herschel Album,” Burlington Magazine 110 (1968): 650–58.

12. Technical report, November 11, 1994, conservation file of Huntington Art Gallery, San Marino, Calif., acc. no. 44.108.

13. For this characterization, see Talley, “‘All Good Pictures Crack,’” 55.

14. Louis Simond, Journal of a Tour and Residence in Great Britain during the Years 1810 and 1811: Second Edition (Edinburgh: J. Ballantyne, 1817), vol. 1, 49.

15. William Mason, “Anecdotes of Sir Joshua Reynolds, Chiefly Relating to His Manner of Coloring,” in Sir Joshua Reynolds’ Notes and Observations on Pictures, ed. W. Cotton (London: J. R. Smith, 1859), 54. Among numerous chemical tests of pigments’ purity that Mason and Reynolds could have known, Robert Dossie (a leading chemist active in London's Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce) quotes the following trial for vermilion in his influential The Handmaid to the Arts: “‘Take a small, but known quantity of the vermillion suspected to be adulterated, and put it into a crucible, having first mixed with it about the same quantity, in bulk, of charcoal dust; put the crucible into a common fire … the crucible, being taken out of the fire, should be well shaken, by striking it against the ground. If the suspected adulteration has been practiced, the lead will be found reduced to its metalline state in the bottom of the crucible, and being weighed and compared with the quantity of cinnabar that was put into the crucible, the proportion of the adulteration may be thence certainly known’”; Dossie, The Handmaid to the Arts (London: Printed for J. Nourse, 1764), 47. On Dossie, see F. W. Gibbs, “Robert Dossie (1717–1777) and the Society of Arts,” Annals of Science 7, no. 2 (1951): 149–72.

16. James Northcote, The Life of Sir Joshua Reynolds, 2 vols. (London: Henry Colburn, 1810), vol. 1, 5. For more on the relationship between Reynolds and Rennell, see Donato Esposito et al., Sir Joshua Reynolds: The Acquisition of Genius (Bristol: Sansom, 2009), 18. Interestingly, when relaying to his brother techniques he had learned in Reynolds's studio, apprentice James Northcote instructed his sibling, “I would not have you mention to Rennell any thing of what I have said concerning Sir Joshua”; James Northcote to Samuel Northcote, September 21, 1771, Royal Academy of Arts, London (hereafter RAA), MS NOR 5, [fol. i r]. For a salutary reminder of the complexity and generic conventions of eighteenth-century artists’ biographies, see Karen Junod, “Writing the Lives of Painters”: Biography and Artistic Identity in Britain 1760–1810 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

17. Joseph Farington, “Memoirs of the Life of Sir Joshua Reynolds with Observations on His Talents and Character,” in The Literary Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds: Fifth Edition, by Joshua Reynolds, ed. E. Malone, 3 vols. (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1819), vol. 1, ccix.

18. Joshua Reynolds to Sir William Forbes, August 6, 1779, in The Letters of Sir Joshua Reynolds, by Joshua Reynolds, ed. John Ingamells and John Edgcumbe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 84. The portrait by Reynolds in question depicts James Hay, 15th Earl of Erroll (1762, private collection), which had hung at Slains Castle in Aberdeenshire; see Mannings and Postle, Sir Joshua Reynolds: A Complete Catalogue, 249.

19. Northcote, The Life of Sir Joshua Reynolds, vol. 2, 21.

20. Discourse VI was read as a lecture on December 10, 1774, and then sold by the Royal Academy's bookseller in the following year as A discourse delivered to the students of the Royal Academy, on the distribution of the prizes, Dec. the 10th, 1774: By the president (London: Thomas Davies, 1775). All references to the Discourses are from the standard, modern edition: Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art, ed. Robert W. Wark (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997).

21. Reynolds, Discourse VI, 106. Classic studies of Reynolds's emulative practice include Edgar Wind, Hume and the Heroic Portrait, ed. Jaynie Anderson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); and E. H. Gombrich, “Reynolds's Theory and Practice of Imitation,” Burlington Magazine 80, no. 467 (February 1942): 40–45.

22. Reynolds, Discourse VI, 107.

23. Richard Wendorf, Sir Joshua Reynolds: The Painter in Society (London: National Gallery, 1996); and David H. Solkin, “Great Pictures or Great Men? Reynolds, Male Portraiture, and the Power of Art,” Oxford Art Journal 9, no. 2 (1986): 42–49.

24. John Barrell, The Political Theory of Painting from Reynolds to Hazlitt: “The Body of the Public” (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 80. Of Reynolds's thought more broadly, Robert R. Wark has written: “The Discourses are considered one of the most eloquent, as well as one of the last presentations of ideas that dominated European art criticism from the mid-fifteenth to the mid-eighteenth century”; Wark, introduction to Reynolds, Discourses on Art, xxi.

25. See Maurice Crosland, “The Image of Science as a Threat: Burke versus Priestley and the ‘Philosophic Revolution,’” British Journal for the History of Science 20, no. 3 (July 1987): 277–307.

26. Important exceptions to this tendency include Mark Hallett, “Reynolds, Celebrity, and the Exhibition Space,” in Joshua Reynolds: The Creation of Celebrity, ed. Martin Postle (London: Tate, 2005), 34–47; and especially Neil De Marchi and Hans J. Van Miegroet, “Ingenuity, Preference, and the Pricing of Pictures: The Smith-Reynolds Connection,” in Economic Engagements with Art, ed. De Marchi and Craufurd D. W. Goodwin (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999), 379–412.

27. Martin Kemp, “True to Their Natures: Sir Joshua Reynolds and Dr. William Hunter at the Royal Academy of Arts,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 46, no. 1 (January 1992): 77–88, at 78. For the classic statement of the “two cultures” story, see C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1959), 1–22.

28. See William R. Newman and Lawrence M. Principe, “Alchemy v. Chemistry: The Etymological Origins of a Historiographic Mistake,” Early Science and Medicine 3, no. 1 (1998): 32–65; and Bruce T. Moran, Distilling Knowledge: Alchemy, Chemistry and the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), esp. 119–24. The differentiation of chemical domains described by Newman and Principe answers well to linguistic usage in Reynolds's immediate circles. In his Dictionary, Dr. Samuel Johnson defined “Alchymy” as “the more sublime and occult part of chymistry, which proposes for its object, the transmutation of metals, and other important operations.” Citing the work of Herman Boerhaave, meanwhile, Johnson gives “Chymistry” as “an art whereby sensible bodies contained in vessels, or capable of being contained therein, are so changed, by means of certain instruments, and principally fire, that their several powers and virtues are thereby discovered, with a view to philosophy, or medicine”; Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language: Second Edition (London: W. Strahan et al., 1755–56), vol. 1, n.p.

29. A note is warranted on the term “science” (and its derivatives) as used here. As historian of science Steven Shapin has influentially argued, science (from the Latin scientia) in early modern Europe denoted the knowledge of necessary universal truths taught in universities, while the often extramural, empirical inquiries into natural particulars were typically referred to as “natural philosophy” or “natural history.” Labeling practitioners in the latter domains with the nineteenth-century term “scientist” is thus anachronistic. However, I follow the dominant trend of recent historiography of science (including Shapin himself) in using the term in a broad, ecumenical sense; where specific meanings of the term are important, I aim to situate them by appealing to sources in Reynolds's immediate historical context. On this approach, compare Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), esp. 5–8; and Deborah E. Harkness, “A Note about ‘Science,’” in The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), xv–xviii.

30. For recent scholarship advocating this reconciliation, see, for example, Michael Yonan, “Toward a Fusion of Art History and Material Culture Studies,” West 86th 18, no. 2 (2011): 232–48; and “The Clever Object,” ed. Matthew C. Hunter and Francesco Lucchini, special issue, Art History 36, no. 2 (May 2013): 478–676.

31. Michael Baxandall, The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 36.

32. De Marchi and Van Miegroet, “Ingenuity,” 386.

33. A useful overview is William H. Brock, The Fontana History of Chemistry (London: Fontana, 1992), esp. 84–127. More broadly, see Jan Golinski, Science as Public Culture: Chemistry and Enlightenment in Britain, 1760–1820 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992); and Archibald Clow and Nan L. Clow, The Chemical Revolution: A Contribution to Social Technology (London: Batchworth, 1952).

34. For the claim that “during the early years of the eighteenth century there was little evidence of any general interest in chemistry—the most fundamental science of the industrial arts,” see Gibbs, “Robert Dossie,” 149. On the Scottish tradition of chemical theory, see Arthur L. Donovan, Philosophical Chemistry in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Doctrines and Discoveries of William Cullen and Joseph Black (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1975).

35. For this proposed list from November 17, 1758, see Royal Society of Arts, London (hereafter RSA), MS RSA/AD/MA/104 PT: 2.

36. For an example of the advertisement of these prizes and the financial incentives, see “Continuation of the Premiums Offered by the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce,” London Evening Post, May 17–19, 1759, n.p.

37. See RSA/AD/MA/100/12/01/01, fol. 227. On this committee, see D. G. C. Allan, “Artists and the Society in the Eighteenth Century,” in The Virtuoso Tribe of Arts and Sciences: Studies in the Eighteenth-Century Work and Membership of the London Society of Arts, ed. Allan and John L. Abbott (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992), 97. On methods of testing verdigris developed by a chemist closely aligned with the Society of Arts, see Dossie, Handmaid to the Arts, 112–15.

38. See Lawrence M. Principe, “A Revolution Nobody Noticed? Changes in Early Eighteenth-Century Chemistry,” in New Narratives in Eighteenth Century Chemistry (Dordrecht: Springer, 2007), 2.

39. On Lewis, see F. W. Gibbs, “William Lewis, M.B., F.R.S. (1708–1781),” Annals of Science 8, no. 2 (1952): 122–51; idem, “A Notebook of William Lewis and Alexander Chisholm,” Annals of Science 8, no. 3 (1952): 202–20; and Larry Stewart, “Assistants to Enlightenment: William Lewis, Alexander Chisholm, and Invisible Technicians in the Industrial Revolution,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 62, no. 1 (March 2008): 17–29.

40. William Lewis, M.B., F.R.S., Commercium Philosophico-Technicum; or, The Philosophical Commerce of Arts (London H. Baldwin, 1763), iv.

41. On chemistry's struggle for autonomy from dominant Newtonian currents, see Lawrence M. Principe, The Aspiring Adept: Robert Boyle and His Alchemical Quest (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 15.

42. For a longer history of alchemy and painters’ practice, see Spike Bucklow, The Alchemy of Paint: Art, Science and Secrets from the Middle Ages (New York: Marion Boyars, 2009).

43. Compare Thomas Crow, Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985); Ellis Waterhouse, Painting in Britain, 1530–1790 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953); and Lucy Gent, ed., Albion's Classicism: The Visual Arts in Britain, 1550–1660 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995).

44. William Aglionby, Painting Illustrated in Three Dialogues (London: John Gain, 1685), sig. b, fol. 2v. More broadly, see David H. Solkin, Painting for Money: The Visual Arts and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).

45. For this phrase, see Iain Pears, The Discovery of Painting: The Growth of Interest in the Arts in England, 1680–1768 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988). For accounts that have foregrounded the role of the Royal Society and a longer virtuoso tradition in the growth of British art, see especially Craig Ashley Hanson, The English Virtuoso: Art, Medicine, and Antiquarianism in the Age of Empiricism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); and Ann Bermingham, Learning to Draw: Studies in the Cultural History of a Polite and Useful Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), esp. 33–73.

46. Rica Jones, introduction to Paint and Purpose: A Study of Technique in British Art, ed. Stephen Hackney et al. (London: Tate Gallery, 1999), 11.

47. For an excellent account of these procedures in the Restoration practice of Peter Lely, see Ella Hendriks and Karen Groen, “Lely's Studio Practice,” Bulletin of the Hamilton Kerr Institute 2 (1994): 21–38. For their extension in the eighteenth century, see Rica Jones, “The Artist's Training and Techniques,” in Manners & Morals: Hogarth and British Painting 1700–1760, ed. Elizabeth Einberg (London: Tate Gallery, 1987), 19–28.

48. Farington, “Memoirs of the Life of Sir Joshua Reynolds,” cxxxiii. Compare Horace Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting in England (Strawberry-Hill: Thomas Kirgate, 1771), vol. 4, esp. 1–3.

49. See Robert Fox and Agustí Nieto-Galan, eds., Natural Dyestuffs and Industrial Culture in Europe, 1750–1880 (Canton: Science History Publications, 1999). For an interesting reading of Reynolds's engagement with Restoration portrait painting, see David Mannings, “Reynolds and the Restoration Portrait,” Connoisseur 183 (July 1973): 186–93.

50. Northcote, The Life of Sir Joshua Reynolds, vol. 2, 21–22.

51. Ibid., 22.

52. For an authoritative overview of studio practice and the color trade in seventeenth-century London and Antwerp, see Jo Kirby, “The Painter's Trade in the Seventeenth Century: Theory and Practice,” National Gallery Technical Bulletin 20 (1999): 5–49. More broadly, see Ian Bristow, “Ready-Mixed Paint in the Eighteenth Century,” Architectural Review 161 (1977): 246–48; and, especially, Thierry de Duve, “The Readymade and the Tube of Paint,” Artforum 24 (1986): 110–21.

53. For this story, see Guildhall Library, London, MS 1758, fol. 131v. More broadly, see Matthew C. Hunter, Wicked Intelligence: Visual Art and the Science of Experiment in Restoration London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 1–4.

54. On Beale, see Tabitha Barber, Mary Beale: Portrait of a Seventeenth-Century Painter, Her Family and Her Studio (London: Geffrye Museum, 1999).

55. Mason, “Anecdotes of Sir Joshua Reynolds,” 53.

56. Ibid., 54. On period accounts of zaffir, compare Dossie, Handmaid to the Arts, 287.

57. For a transcription of the Ledgers, see Malcolm Cormack, “The Ledgers of Sir Joshua Reynolds,” Walpole Society 42 (1968–70): 105–69.

58. On this bilingual practice, see Talley, “‘All Good Pictures Crack,’” 57.

59. On this painting, now at the Huntington Art Gallery, see Mannings and Postle, Sir Joshua Reynolds: A Complete Catalogue, 425.

60. Joshua Reynolds, Ledger Book, vol. 2, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, MS 2.1916, fol. 178v.

61. Helen Brett to Shelley M. Bennett, February 2, 2002, conservation file of Huntington Art Gallery, acc. no. 23.62.

62. Jones, Paint and Purpose, 12.

63. Mason, “Anecdotes of Sir Joshua Reynolds,” 55–56.

64. See Maxine Berg and Helen Clifford, eds., Consumers and Luxury: Consumer Culture in Europe, 1650–1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999).

65. Martin Archer Shee, The Commemoration of Reynolds, in Two Parts, with Notes, and Other Poems (London: J. Murray, 1814), 14.

66. Ibid., 13.

67. Farington, “Memoirs of the Life of Sir Joshua Reynolds,” cclxxxvii–cclxxxviii.

68. British Institution for Promoting the Fine Arts in the United Kingdom, Catalogue of Pictures by the Late Sir Joshua Reynolds: Exhibited by the Permission of the Proprietors, in Honor of the Memory of That Distinguished Artist and for the Improvement of British Art (London: W. Bulmer, 1813), 12.

69. Ibid., 12–13.

70. Malone, “Some Account of the Life of the Author,” in Reynolds, The Literary Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds, vol. 1, lvi. See also Talley, “‘All Good Pictures Crack,’” 56–57.

71. British Institution, Catalogue of Pictures, 13.

72. Ibid.

73. Charles Lock Eastlake gives a partial transcription of Reynolds's notation on one of these canvases, noting that many of its experiments were made in 1772; Eastlake, Materials for a History of Oil Painting (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1847), vol. 1, 444. For the object's modern exhibition as “Experiments with varnishes and oil pigments on canvas,” see Penny, Reynolds, 335. According to correspondence documenting the object's provenance, the Royal Academy artifact is one of two such canvases by Reynolds purchased from the sale of Sir Thomas Lawrence's collection in the 1830s, lent to Eastlake in the 1840s, and eventually sold to the institution for fifty pounds sterling in 1878; see George Barker to the president and Council of the RA, October 29, 1877, RAA, Conservation File 03/576.

74. For an overview of Wedgwood's experimentation, see Hilary Young, The Genius of Wedgwood (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1995); and Adrian Forty, Objects of Desire: Design and Society 1750–1980 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986), 17–41.

75. On page 31 of his copy of the Discourses, Blake wrote, “Bacon's Philosophy has Ruin’d England!” See Reynolds, Discourses, 295.

76. Malone, “Some Account,” xxxi, quotes Reynolds this way: “Instead of patching up a particular work on the narrow plan of imitation, [the artist should] rather endeavor to acquire the art and power of thinking. … In reality indeed it appears to me, that a man must begin by the study of others. Thus Bacon became a great thinker by entering into and making himself master of the thoughts of other men.”

77. On Reynolds's relation to Baker, see ibid., iv. On Baker, see Biographia Britannica; or, Lives of the Most Eminent Persons Who Have Flourished in Great Britain and Ireland (1747; Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1973), vol. 1, 422. For Wadham College in the era of the Civil War, see Charles Webster, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine, and Reform, 1626–1660 (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1976). On the amateur scientific interests of Reynolds's father, see Frederick Whiley Hilles, The Literary Career of Sir Joshua Reynolds (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936), 4.

78. For this proposed placement, see Charles Robert Leslie and Tom Taylor, Life and Times of Sir Joshua Reynolds, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1865), vol. 1, 16.

79. J. Northcote to S. Northcote, London, September 21, 1771, RAA MS NOR 5, [fol. i v].

80. For a reproduction of Reynolds's Dr. John Mudge, F.R.S. (1752, oil on canvas, private collection) and an illuminating discussion of these networks of friendship, see Robyn Asleson et al., British Paintings at the Huntington (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 290–93.

81. In the spring of 1772, he writes: “I have receiv’d the Box with the brass patterns and have them all cast except the mettals which could not be cast 'till the man had more to cast them with but you may be sure I shall send them by the first opportunity”; J. Northcote to S. Northcote, April 8, 1772, RAA MS NOR 9, [fol. i r].

82. See, for example, J. Northcote to S. Northcote, June 25, 1771, RAA MS NOR 1.

83. As Northcote explains to his brother: “Sir Joshua is now building a very beautiful house at Richmond where he intends to go often in the summer[;] from it there is a very fine prospect. Now he has not got any telescope and very probably has never look’d through a reflex lens[?]. If you at particular times now and then. .. would fit up one of any size even small and in the plainest manner as he might be told the whole excellence was in the metals and give it him as your own making and I will always consider myself in your debt for it ’till it is in my power to make a return”; J. Northcote to S. Northcote, December 21, 1771, RAA MS NOR 7, [fol. i v]. Although this object is now untraced, a subsequent letter sent by Northcote to his brother in 1776 suggests that the telescope was indeed given; see J. Northcote to S. Northcote, June 30, 1776, RAA MS NOR 25, [fol. i r–i v].

84. J. Northcote to S. Northcote, August 23, 1771, RAA MS NOR 4, [fol. i v].

85. J. Northcote to S. Northcote, September 21, 1775, RAA MS NOR 5, [fol. ii v].

86. J. Northcote to S. Northcote, July 27, 1772, RAA MS NOR 11, [fol. i v–ii r].

87. On Northcote's lowly status, see Martin Postle, “Northcote, James (1746–1831),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), online ed. 2008, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/20326 (accessed January 27, 2014).

88. For this claim, see Malone, “Some Account,” xxxiii.

89. Ibid., xxxiii–xxxiv.

90. See, for example, Thomas Mudge, Thoughts on the Means of Improving Watches and more particularly those for the Use of the Sea (London, 1765); and Thomas Mudge Jr., A Narrative of Facts relating to some Time-Keepers constructed by Mr. Thomas Mudge (London: Thomas Payne, 1792).

91. John Mudge, Directions for Making the Best Composition for the Metals of Reflecting Telescopes (London: W. Bowyer and J. Nichols, 1777), 7.

92. Quoted in Malone, “Some Account,” xcviii. For more on Burke's scientific ideas, see Aris Sarafianos, “Pain, Labor, and the Sublime: Medical Gymnastics and Burke's Aesthetics,” Representations 91 (Summer 2005): 58–83.

93. Samuel Johnson, Dictionary of the English Language, vol. 2, n.p. This last usage coincides closely with the lesson Reynolds would subsequently profess to have learned from experimental philosophy. In Discourse XIII of 1786, the president directs his auditors to avoid making art either a matter of imitation alone or of mere “experiment, as to exclude from it the application of science, which alone gives dignity and compass to any art. But to find proper foundations for science is neither to narrow or to vulgarise it; and this is sufficiently exemplified in the success of experimental philosophy”; Reynolds, Discourses, 231–32.

94. [Joshua Reynolds], “To the Idler,” Idler 82 (November 10, 1759): 237. For an illuminating account of Reynolds's conception of “the mechanical,” see Joel Snyder, “Res Ipsa Loquitur,” in Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science, ed. Lorraine Daston (New York: Zone Books, 2004), 195–221, esp. 200–202.

95. See RSA EC/1760/14. Although we have no evidence of his activity in the institution, Reynolds still had some cognizance of its activities; in a letter of 1770, he congratulated Sir William Hamilton “on the honour you have acquired by the account you have given to the Royal Society of Vesuvius and Aetna”; Reynolds to Hamilton, June 17, 1770, in Reynolds, Letters, 33.

96. See, for example, Hugh Trevor-Roper, “Mayerne and His Manuscript,” in Art and Patronage in the Caroline Courts: Essays in Honour of Sir Oliver Millar, ed. David Howarth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 264–93.

97. [Thomas Povey], “An Account of a Secret in the Use of Painting in Answer to the Command of the R. Society Brought in by Mr. Povey, and read before the Society Dec. 19, 1667,” Royal Society of London, Register Book Original, vol. 3, fols. 259–64. For Povey's broader chemical interests, see Povey, “The Method, Manner and Order of the Transmutation of Copper into Brass, etc.,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 22 (1700–1701): 474–75.

98. Povey, “An Account of a Secret,” fol. 263.

99. See Richard Waller, “A Catalogue of Simple or Mixt Colours, with a Specimen of Each Colour Prefixt to Its Proper Name,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 16 (1686): 24–32.

100. On Petty and his broader alchemical interests, see Ted McCormick, William Petty and the Ambitions of Political Arithmetic (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).

101. William Petty, “An Apparatus to the History of the Common Practices of Dying,” in The History of the Royal Society of London: Third Edition by Thomas Sprat (London: J. Knapton et al., 1722), 297–98.

102. William Petty, “General Observations on Dying,” in Sprat, History of the Royal Society, 306.

103. See William Cole, “A Letter from Mr. William Cole of Bristol, to the Philosophical Society of Oxford, Containing His Observations on the Purple Fish,” Philosophical Transactions 178 (December 1685): 1285–86. For a broader reading of Cole's dye experiments, see Edward Eigen, “On Purple and the Genesis of Photography or the Natural History of an Exposure,” in Ocean Flowers: Impressions from Nature, ed. Carol Armstrong and Catherine de Zegher (New York: Drawing Center, 2004), 270–87.

104. William Cole to Robert Plot, February 5, 1685, in Early Science at Oxford, vol. 12, Dr. Plot and the Correspondence of the Philosophical Society of Oxford, ed. R. T. Gunther (Oxford: Printed for the Subscribers, 1939), 263–64.

105. See William Eamon, “Robert Boyle and the Discovery of Colour Indicators,” Ambix 27, no. 3 (November 1980): 204–9; and Cole to Plot, 264.

106. See Henry Oldenburg, “An Experiment of a Way of Preparing a Liquor, That Shall Sink into, and Colour the Whole Body of Marble, Causing a Picture, Drawn on a Surface, to Appear Also in the Inmost Parts of the Stone,” Philosophical Transactions 1 (1665–66): 125–27.

107. Nehemiah Grew, Musaeum Regalis Societatis; or, A Catalogue & Description of the Natural and Artificial Rarities belonging to the Royal Society and preserved at Gresham Colledge (London: W. Rawlins, 1681), 254. For more on Stelluti's theories, see Andrew C. Scott and David Freedberg, Fossil Woods and Other Geological Specimens: The Paper Museum of Cassiano dal Pozzo, Series B, Natural History, pt. 3 (Turnhout: Harvey Miller, 2000).

108. Grew, Musaeum Regalis Societatis, 253.

109. For a discussion of Hooke's acid model, see Matthew Hunter, “Experiment, Theory, Representation: Robert Hooke's Material Models,” in Beyond Mimesis and Convention: Representation in Art and Science, ed. Roman Frigg and Hunter (New York: Springer, 2010), 193–219.

110. [Frederick Slare], “An Account of Several Experiments made with the Shining Substance of the liquid and of the Solid Phosphorous, Prepared and Communicated to the Collector, by Dr. Frederick Slare, Fellow of the Royal Society, and one of the Collegde of Physicians,” Philosophical Collections 3 (December 10, 1681): 48.

111. Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, MS Reynolds 38, n.p. In the manuscript, Reynolds has struck out the last line of this quotation.

112. Studying Jan van Eyck's Virgin and Child with Canon Van der Paele (1436; now in the Groeningemuseum, Bruges) on June 28, 1781, Reynolds wrote the following in his notebook: “This Picture claims perhaps more attention from its being the work of the man who has been said to be the first inventor of the art of Painting in oil, than from any intrinsic merit in the work itself[,] however this mistake which was first published by Vasari and from his authority propagated in the world, has been lately <rectified> by the learned antiquarian Mr. Raspe who has proved beyond all contradiction that this art was invented <and practiced> many ages before Van Eyck was born”; Yale Center for British Art, MS Reynolds 38, n.p. This is an unambiguous reference to the erudite study published that year by R. E. Raspe as A Critical Essay on Oil-Painting; Proving that the Art of Painting in Oil was Known before the Pretended Discovery of John and Hubert Van Eyck (London: H. Goldney, 1781).

113. Northcote, The Life of Sir Joshua Reynolds, vol. 2, 40.

114. Ibid.

115. Jonathan Richardson, An Essay on the Theory of Painting: Second Edition (London: Printed for A. C. and sold by A. Bettesworth in Pater-Noster-Row, 1725), 4. On the importance of Richardson's work to Reynolds, see Malone, “Some Account,” vii.

116. For William Hogarth's expanded critique of patina, see Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty, ed. Ronald Paulson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 91–92. More generally, see the articles on patina by Randolph Starn, Eileen Cleere, and Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby in Representations 78, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 86–144.

117. On the semantic ambiguities between sitters’ makeup and Reynolds's pigments, see Aimee Marcereau Degalan, “Dangerous Beauty: Painted Canvases and Painted Faces in Eighteenth-Century Britain” (PhD diss., Case Western Reserve University, 2007).

118. Corsican general Pasquali Paoli, as cited in Reynolds, Letters, 94.

119. Horace Walpole's Correspondence, ed. W. S. Lewis and Ralph S. Brown Jr., vol. 10 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1941), 79.

120. J. T. Smith, Nollekens and His Times (London: Henry Colburn, 1828), vol. 2, 291–92.

121. N. B., M.D. [Nicholas Barbon], A Discourse of Trade (London: Thomas Milbourn, 1690), 26.

122. See especially Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982); and John Brewer and Roy Porter, Consumption and the World of Goods (New York: Routledge, 1993).

123. Barbon, A Discourse of Trade, 27.

124. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), pt. 5, sec. 4, 228.

125. In a letter to Bennett Langton of September 12, 1782, Reynolds reported having heard Adam Smith's ideas on the pleasure of imitation in the arts and giving them his full agreement; in Reynolds, Letters, 110–11.

126. Leslie and Taylor, Life and Times of Sir Joshua Reynolds, vol. 2, 134. On Reynolds's resulting picture, Miss Bowles (ca. 1775, Wallace Collection, London), see Mannings and Postle, Sir Joshua Reynolds: A Complete Catalogue, 101–2.

127. De Marchi and Van Miegroet, “Ingenuity, Preference,” 401.

128. Horace Walpole's Correspondence, ed. W. S. Lewis et al., vol. 33 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), 571–72.

129. Reynolds, Discourse VI, 107. For an interesting examination of the alchemical traditions informing theories of mind on which Reynolds could be drawing, see Antonio Clericuzio, “The Internal Laboratory: The Chemical Reinterpretation of Medical Spirits in England (1650–1680),” in Alchemy and Chemistry in the 16th and 17th Centuries, ed. Piyo Rattansi and Clericuzio (Boston: Kluwer, 2002), 51–83.

130. Reynolds, Discourse VI, 94. For recent scholarship on early modern attempts to reckon with the production of artistic novelty through emulation, see Maria H. Loh, “New and Improved: Repetition as Originality in Italian Baroque Practice and Theory,” Art Bulletin 86, no. 3 (September 2004): 477–504; and Paul Duro, “‘The Surest Measure of Perfection’: Approaches to Imitation in Seventeenth-Century French Art and Theory,” Word & Image 25, no. 4 (October–December 2009): 363–83.

131. Reynolds, Discourse VI, 106.

132. For ancient sources and alchemical connections of this mythical story, see David M. Jacobson, “Corinthian Bronze and the Gold of the Alchemists,” Gold Bulletin 33, no. 2 (2000): 60–66.

133. This reciprocal dialogue with artistic and chemical tradition seems to subtend Reynolds's claim in preparatory notes for Discourse VI that “when I recommend … enriching & manuring the mind with other mens thoughts I suppose the Artist to know his Art so as to know what to choose and what to reject”; quoted in Hilles, Literary Career, 224.

134. Northcote, The Life of Sir Joshua Reynolds, vol. 2, 7.

135. On this tradition, see William R. Newman, Promethean Ambitions: Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

136. “Sir Joshua Reynolds,” General Evening Post, February 25, 1792, n.p.

137. See, for example, John Newman, “Reynolds and Hone: ‘The Conjuror’ Unmasked,” in Penny, Reynolds, 344–54.

138. “A Lover of Wit,” Public Advertiser, May 15, 1775, n.p.

139. Farington, “Memoirs of the Life of Sir Joshua Reynolds,” ccxiii.

140. For more on the iconography of alchemy in the northern European tradition, see Principe and DeWitt, Transmutations.

141. For an account of this picture, see Mary Webster, Johan Zoffany 1733–1810 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 206–10. For Reynolds's purchase of it, see Martin Postle, “Johann Zoffany: An Artist Abroad,” in Johann Zoffany RA: Society Observed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 25.

142. Morning Herald and Daily Advertiser, March 2, 1785, n.p.

143. Jones, “Artist's Training and Techniques,” 27.

144. On the encaustic revival, see Danielle Rice, “The Fire of the Ancients: The Encaustic Painting Revival, 1755 to 1812” (PhD diss., Yale University, 1979). For Anne-Louis Girodet's technical experimentation, see Thomas Crow, Emulation: Making Artists for Revolutionary France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 171–88; and idem, Modern Art in the Common Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 119–21.

145. See John Gage, “Magilphs and Mysteries,” Apollo 80 (July 1964): 38–41.

146. Compare David Saunders and Antony Griffiths, “Two ‘Mechanical’ Oil Paintings after de Loutherbourg: History and Technique,” in Spring, Studying Old Master Paintings, 186–93; David Bjelajac, Washington Allston, Secret Societies and the Alchemy of Anglo-American Painting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); and Lance Mayer and Gay Myers, American Painters on Technique: The Colonial Period to 1860 (Los Angeles: Getty Museum, 2011).

147. See Mark N. Aronson and Angus Trumble, Benjamin West and the Venetian Secret (New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, 2008).

148. For popular chemistry, see Simond, Journal of a Tour and Residence, vol. 1, 43. For the artistic context, see Leslie Carlyle, “The Artist's Anticipation of Change as Discussed in British Nineteenth Century Instruction Books on Oil Painting,” in Appearance, Opinion, Change: Evaluating the Look of Paintings (London: United Kingdom Institute for Conservation, 1990), 62–67.

149. Compare Eastlake, Materials for a History of Oil Painting, vol. 1, 545–46; and Elizabeth Prettejohn, The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 38.

150. Eastlake, Materials for a History of Oil Painting, vol. 1, 538, 546.

151. For exchanges between Eastlake and Lord Elcho, see Jaynie Anderson, “The First Cleaning Controversy at the National Gallery 1846–1853,” in Appearance, Opinion, Change, 5.

152. Francis Charteris, Lord Elcho, to unidentified recipient, June 9, 1859, National Gallery of Scotland, File NG 338, fols. 1r–2r.

153. For art historical engagement with the Coutts bank, see Albert Boime, Art in an Age of Revolution, 1750–1800 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 267. On the relations of Reynolds and Coutts, see Mannings and Postle, Sir Joshua Reynolds: A Complete Catalogue, 148–49. From 1781 (admittedly, after James Coutts's death in 1778), Reynolds paid his sister, Frances Reynolds, a quarterly allowance from an account with the Coutts bank; see Reynolds, Letters, 104.

154. On uses and sources of mahogany in Reynolds's portraiture, see Rica Jones, “Joshua Reynolds's George VI when Prince of Wales,” in Stephen Hackney et al., Paint and Purpose, 146. I thank Mark N. Aronson, who has trenchantly observed that, visually attractive though it is, the “flame” of grain directly below the sitter's cravat is a signature of the wood's instability; an experienced painter on wood would never have selected such a panel. Spike Bucklow has kindly alerted me that unprimed mahogany was also used by seventeenth-century Dutch painters, including Pieter Saenredam.

155. Francis Charteris, Lord Elcho, June 9, 1859, fols. 2r–v. In this sense, I take the point made to me in correspondence by conservator Alex Gent that the currently visible damage to the panel is most likely the product of overcleaning rather than faulty facture by Reynolds. However, Elcho was clearly interested in deploying the painting's decayed state to teach a lesson about Reynolds's practice in general.

156. Reynolds, Commonplace Book, Yale Center for British Art, MS Reynolds 33, fol. 44v. As this paragraph in particular will suggest, the title and argument of this essay take inspiration from Walter Benn Michaels's “Action and Accident: Photography and Writing,” in The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism: American Literature at the Turn of the Century (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), 215–44.

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Matthew C. Hunter

Matthew C. Hunter is author of Wicked Intelligence: Visual Art and the Science of Experiment in Restoration London (Chicago, 2013), an editor of Grey Room, and assistant professor at McGill University [Department of Art History and Communication Studies, McGill University, 853 Sherbrooke Street West, Montreal, QC, H3A 0G5, Canada, [email protected]].