In panting anticipation of National Take Your Dog to Work Day (October 4, apparently), this week’s picture is Sir Joshua Reynolds’s fresh and incisive portrait of Mary, Countess of Bute. The wife of a former Prime Minister of England is encountered in haughty old age, walking her King Charles spaniel – an ingratiating little creature whose name has not been passed down to posterity – somewhere in the extensive grounds of Luton Hoo.


Reynolds animated and invigorated the English eighteenth-century portrait tradition, taking it out into the open air and giving it a new drama and immediacy. His work delighted an aristocratic clientele who had grown wearily accustomed to being depicted, by phizmongers of a lesser order, as stiff and glassy-eyed tailors’ dummies in the aquarium light of a perpetual, musty indoors. His prices were unprecedentedly high, his account book for the 1780s showing that the Earl of Bute paid all of £150 for the painting reproduced here. But it was money well spent. Reynolds may never have painted a better whole-length portrait than this. The picture has the drama of a chance encounter. Its effects of movement and instantaneity are cleverly enhanced by the painter’s cropping of the sitter’s dress and by his slightly blurred, impressionistic depiction of the fawning canine projectile that is her dog. It is as if they have both suddenly arrived on the scene. Reynolds does not simply depict his sitter, he puts her into a dramatic relationship with the viewer, who is cast in the role of the houseguest suddenly bumping into his hostess somewhere in the garden. But the painting is edgy and uncomfortable, as well as extremely vivid. The Countess seems less than delighted to have met with us. Her expression suggests that she might rather be alone.


When Reynolds painted the...

To read the full article please either login or register .