Copy after Joshua Reynolds
The story
At the Royal Academy in the spring of 1779 Reynolds showed a portrait of Philadelphia Payne-Gallwey, a young mother bending forward with her small son Charles riding on her back. Among all his pictures of mothers and children it is the only piggy-back. Engravers reproduced it, copyists repeated it by hand, and the National Trust alone keeps several painted versions in its houses. The original is in the Taft Museum of Art in Cincinnati.
Copy after Joshua Reynolds is the label a museum gives to such a picture. The composition is his and the brushwork belongs to someone else, usually someone whose name is lost. The label makes no claim that Reynolds ever touched the canvas.
Copies under this heading here include a version of that piggy-back portrait, at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. Another, at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, repeats a portrait of the actress and poet Mary Robinson that the museum dates to 1783 and 1784.
