Follower of Joshua Reynolds
The story
By the time Reynolds died in 1792, his way of painting a sitter was everywhere in British portraiture. Pupils who had trained in his house, such as James Northcote, and many more painters who knew his work only from the Royal Academy exhibitions and from engravings, posed their sitters the way he did. In the next century, when collectors in Britain and then in America competed for his portraits, a good deal of that work was sold under his name.
Follower of Joshua Reynolds is the label a museum gives to a picture painted in his manner by someone whose name has been lost. It claims less than attributed to, which would mean the museum thinks Reynolds probably painted it himself, and it does not mean an assistant working in his studio.
The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston uses this label for a portrait of a man. Tradition says it shows the admiral Lord Anson, and the museum keeps that name only as something the picture is said to be.
