The Grand Manner Portrait

In Britain, the eighteenth century was the age of the portrait. Painters built on the elegance of Van Dyck, who had worked for Charles I a century before. The Grand Manner portrait posed sitters with dignity, in rich fabrics, often full length, against grand landscapes or columns, borrowing poses from ancient statues and Old Master paintings.

The leading theorist was Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723 to 1792), the first president of the Royal Academy of Arts, founded in London in 1768. In his lectures, the Discourses on Art (1769 to 1790), he urged painters to idealize nature, following the Old Masters, and he ranked history painting highest.

Key idea

Grand Manner portraits by Thomas Gainsborough (The Blue Boy, about 1770) and Joshua Reynolds posed sitters with dignity, rich fabric and landscape backgrounds. Academies ranked portraits below history painting, but portraits paid most artists' bills.

Looking closely: The Blue Boy

Thomas Gainsborough, The Blue Boy, about 1770. The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, California.

Describe. A boy stands full length in a shimmering blue satin suit with lace collar, holding a plumed hat, against a stormy brown landscape. Analyze. The cool blue is the brightest thing on the canvas, set against warm browns; Gainsborough's quick, feathery strokes make the satin flicker. The low viewpoint and the long figure give the boy a grand presence. Interpret. The suit is not the fashion of 1770: it imitates the clothes in Van Dyck's portraits of the 1630s, an homage to the painter Gainsborough admired. A popular story says the blue answered Reynolds's advice to keep blue to small accents, but Reynolds gave that lecture in 1778, about eight years after the painting, so the story is doubtful. The sitter was long said to be Jonathan Buttall, the son of a merchant, but that identification has been debated.

The ranking of genres

The hierarchy of genres taught by the French and British academies.
Rank	Genre	Why it was ranked there
1 (highest)	History painting: history, religion, myth	It needs learning, imagination and many figures
2	Portrait	It records a real person, but only one
3	Genre scene	Everyday life, thought to need less learning
4	Landscape	Nature without a story
5 (lowest)	Still life	Objects only

Why it works

The ranking was the academies' theory; the market was different. History paintings were large, slow and hard to sell. Wealthy families wanted portraits of themselves for their houses. So most British painters, including Reynolds himself, earned their living from portraits, while dreaming of history painting.

Common mistake

People think the portrait was a minor genre. The academies ranked it below history painting, but portraits were the most common commissions, paid most artists' bills, and include some of the greatest works of the age. Rank in theory is not the same as importance in practice.

Worked example: Which genre?

A huge canvas shows a Roman general refusing a crown, with twenty figures in togas. Where would an academy rank it, and why?

The subject is a story from history with a moral.
It needs many figures, knowledge of the past and imagination.
That is history painting, the top of the hierarchy.

Answer: History painting, the highest rank.

The Blue Boy was sold to the American collector Henry E. Huntington in 1921 for a record price, and its departure from Britain caused an outcry. It has hung in California ever since.

The Grand Manner Portrait

Looking closely: The Blue Boy

The ranking of genres

Practice

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Sources and further reading