Not on display
- Artist
- Sir Joshua Reynolds 1723–1792
- Medium
- Oil paint on canvas
- Dimensions
- Support: 759 × 634 mm
frame: 946 × 813 × 105 mm - Collection
- Tate
- Acquisition
- Bequeathed by Miss Emily Drummond 1930
- Reference
- N04505
Display caption
Creating self-portraits in character or pulling a face was a traditional form of student exercise. But this image was created when the painter was the most famous artist of the age. Instead of an experiment, it seems to be a more considered statement.
Reynolds may have focused on his own struggle to hear (he went deaf in later years) as a way of expressing the artist’s struggle to create an image from his raw materials. In his lectures on art, delivered at the Royal Academy, Reynolds stressed the arduous, and thus morally uplifting, nature of art.
Gallery label, August 2004
Does this text contain inaccurate information or language that you feel we should improve or change? We would like to hear from you.
Explore
- people(22,072)
-
- actions: postures and motions(9,111)
-
- hand / hands raised(143)
- adults(20,120)
-
- man(10,453)
- diseases and conditions(1,487)
-
- deafness(10)
- named individuals(12,887)
-
- Reynolds, Joshua(20)
- portraits(4,491)
-
- self-portraits(888)
- arts and entertainment(7,210)
-
- artist, painter(2,545)
You might like
-
Sir Joshua Reynolds Master Crewe as Henry VIII
c.1775 -
Sir Joshua Reynolds A Man’s Head
c.1771–3 -
Sir Joshua Reynolds Sir Abraham Hume
c.1783 -
Sir Joshua Reynolds Self-Portrait
c.1775 -
Sir Joshua Reynolds Mr Huddesford and Mr Bampfylde
c.1778 -
Sir Joshua Reynolds Admiral Viscount Keppel
1780 -
Sir Joshua Reynolds Doctor Samuel Johnson
?1772 -
Sir Joshua Reynolds Self-Portrait when Young
1753–8 -
After Sir Joshua Reynolds Doctor Johnson Arguing
c.1770 -
Sir Joshua Reynolds The Hon. Miss Monckton
1777–8 -
Sir Joshua Reynolds Sir Watkin Williams-Wynn and his Mother
c.1768–9 -
Manner of Sir Joshua Reynolds Portrait of a Man, probably Francis Barber
date not known -
Sir Joshua Reynolds Mrs Richard Cumberland
?1763 -
Manner of Sir Joshua Reynolds Portrait of a Man, probably Francis Barber
date not known -
Sir Joshua Reynolds Frederick Howard, 5th Earl of Carlisle
1769
