Joshua Reynolds

When the Royal Academy of Arts was founded in 1768, its members chose Joshua Reynolds as first president, and King George III knighted him within the year. Reynolds used the position to argue for what he called the Grand Style, an approach borrowed from Roman and Florentine masters he had studied during two years in Rome, and he spelled out the theory in 15 lectures delivered at the Academy between 1769 and 1790, later published as Discourses on Art.

His own studio was extraordinarily productive, turning out more than 2,000 paintings over his career, most of them portraits of the aristocracy and the London figures he knew personally. He painted the writer Samuel Johnson, the actor David Garrick, and the statesman Edmund Burke, all friends from the same London social circle, capturing them with the same formal grandeur he preached from the lectern.

That formality put him at odds with a fellow Academy founder, Thomas Gainsborough, who favored looser brushwork and cooler colors and had little patience for Reynolds's classical borrowings. The two competed for the same aristocratic sitters for two decades, rarely speaking, though Reynolds is said to have visited Gainsborough on his deathbed in 1788. Reynolds himself died in London in 1792, having gone blind in his last years.