Reynolds and Detachment

The Reith Lectures

BBC

Society & Culture, Science

4.2 • 770 Ratings

🗓️ 30 October 1955

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This year's Reith lecturer is Dr Nikolaus Pevsner, the German-born British scholar of history of art and architecture, and author of the county guide series, The Buildings of England (1951–74). In this series, Pevsner explores the qualities of art which he regards as particularly English, as illustrated in the works of several English artists, and what they say about the English national character.

In his third lecture, Dr Pevsner examines the work of the portrait painter Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792), and argues that the far-reaching contrast between his promotion of painting in the Grand Manner, and how he actually painted, is eminently English.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Reith Lectures.
0:04.7	This lecture in the series The Englishness of English art, given by Nicholas Pevsner, was originally broadcast in 1955.
0:15.5	We present the third in the series of BBC wreath lectures on the Englishness of English
0:22.6	art, given by Dr. Nicholas
0:25.0	Pedsner.
0:26.7	He calls this lecture
0:28.1	Reynolds and Detachment.
0:33.9	Last time I talked to you about
0:35.9	William Hogarth.
0:42.3	Sir Joshua Reynolds was not friendly towards Hogarth. It's true that when he was 65, he was ready to grant Hogarth within his own field of familiar scenes from common life,
0:53.3	a mastery in which probably he will never be equaled.
0:58.3	However, 18 years earlier, when Hogarth had been dead only six years, Reynolds was less
1:05.0	tolerant. Hogarth, he then said, expressed with precision the various shades of passion as they are exhibited by vulgar minds.
1:16.6	And those, he added, who employ their pencil only on such low and confined subjects, can never enter into competition with the universal presiding idea of the art.
1:30.1	These passages come from discourses, delivered by Reynolds at the prizegivings of the Royal Academy,
1:36.5	of which he was president.
1:38.9	Hogarth, only a few years before the foundation of that academy had expressed himself with his usual
1:45.3	outspokenness against the foolish parade of an official academy on the French example.
1:52.3	He was, as I have explained, virulently anti-foreign, even to the extent of wanting to exclude
2:00.3	travels of students to Italy.
2:03.6	Reynolds had been in Rome for over two years and in his discourses reiterated the necessity of such journeys for students.
2:12.6	According to him, they cannot develop their art without a knowledge of classical antiquity.
	...

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