Book Description

Excerpt from The Literary Career of Sir Joshua Reynolds To write of the founder of the English school of painting, avoiding as far as possible any reference to his pictures, will undoubtedly provoke criticism. In Sir Joshua's day a prominent bishop remarked that Mallet in his Life of Bacon had forgotten that he was a philosopher; and if he should write the Life of the Duke of Marlborough, which he had undertaken to do, he would probably forget that he was a General Similar charges have been directed at several modern biographies of poets in which poetry receives but scant notice. Were there no good books dealing with Sir Joshua's portraits and his career as an artist, such a study as this would be inexcusable. But the case is otherwise. In spite of minor inaccuracies, the biography by Leslie and Taylor, published in I 86 5, still remains the standard work on the subject. And there have been more than fifty other lives of the painter, of which those by Claude Phillips, Sir Walter Armstrong, and William B. Boulton are noteworthy. Whoever wishes to read of Reynolds the painter will have no difficulty in procuring the proper books. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.