Acknowledgements

Hallett, Mark

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Acknowledgements

Mark Hallett

Reynolds: Portraiture in Action

~~This book has taken a long time to research and write, and there are far too many people to thank for helping it on its way. I will therefore begin by registering my appreciation in the broadest possible terms.

Author

Mark Hallett

PublisherPaul Mellon Centre

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-22304

Acknowledgements

This book has taken a long time to research and write, and there are far too many people to thank for helping it on its way. I will therefore begin by registering my appreciation in the broadest possible terms.

Most of the book was written during my time at the History of Art Department and the Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies at the University of York. I thank my former colleagues and students at the University for their interest and input; it was a privilege to have been part of such a fine department and such a vibrant interdisciplinary centre. More recently, I was lucky enough to work on the book during my first few months at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, and I thank my colleagues at the Centre and at its sister institution, the Yale Center for British Art, for giving me the time to finish the manuscript and for making me feel so at home. I would also like to thank all the other scholars and students with whom I have talked about Reynolds’s portraits: my arguments have been continually shaped by their questions and feedback. Thanks, too, to the team at Yale University Press – in particular Emily Lees – who have ensured that yet another of their publications has maintained the impeccable editorial and design standards for which they are so celebrated.

I have to give special thanks to certain individuals, however. Gillian Malpass has supported this project from beginning to end and been a perfect editor to work for, by turns firm and patient. I would like to thank Brian Allen, who has also supported this book from its inception, and who has generously shared his thoughts and research materials on Reynolds’s work. Amy Meyers, who sets such an inspiring example of generous and dynamic scholarly leadership, has provided a great boost to this project’s final stages. I also wish to thank the renowned Reynolds scholar Martin Postle, with whom I worked closely on the 2005 Tate Britain exhibition Joshua Reynolds: The Creation of Celebrity, and who is now my colleague at the Mellon Centre. Martin graciously agreed to read this book in draft form, and his comments on the manuscript have been much appreciated. Similarly, Kate Retford and an anonymous reader for Yale University Press provided extremely helpful reports on the draft text. Richard Stephens offered a characteristically incisive and bracing response to earlier versions of some of the book’s chapters. Caitlin Blackwell and Maisoon Rehani were indefatigable and rigorous picture researchers for this book, and Tessa Kilgarriff did some very helpful research on the press criticism of the period. Meanwhile, the conversation and friendship of John Barrell, John Brewer, Martina Droth, Richard Johns, Amanda Lillie, Sarah Monks, Martin Myrone, Christine and Jacqueline Riding, Sarah Turner and Michael White have continually spurred me onwards. The same was true of Angela Rosenthal, who, so sadly, is no longer with us. Lynda and Katie Murphy have offered their own unique support, through thick and thin, for many years. Thanks, too, of course, go to the rest of my lovely family.

As my dedication suggests, this book is especially indebted to two other individuals. David Mannings, doyen of Reynolds scholars, agreed to read each of the book’s chapters as they were written, and provided me with invaluable encouragement and advice during the text’s long gestation. I am privileged to have had such a wise and sensitive reader. David Solkin, having discussed this project with me over many years, went through the draft manuscript with his customary thoroughness, fairness and brilliance. As always, he has proved a great teacher and friend.

I am also grateful to the following institutions for providing me with the means to research and write parts of this book in relative calm: the Leverhulme Foundation, which granted me a Research Fellowship in the academic year 2003–4, and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, which granted me a Senior Fellowship for the academic year 2006–7.

Parts of this book have been published in different forms elsewhere. A section of chapter 5 draws on ‘From Out of the Shadows: Sir Joshua Reynolds’ Captain Robert Orme’, Visual Culture in Britain, 5, no. 2, 2004, pp. 41–62. An earlier version of chapter 9 appeared as Faces in a Library: Sir Joshua Reynolds’s ‘Streatham Worthies’ (The Watson Gordon Lecture 2011), Edinburgh, 2012. An earlier version of chapter 10 appeared as ‘A Monument to Intimacy: Joshua Reynolds’s The Marlborough Family’, Art History, 31, no. 5, November 2008, pp. 691–720. Parts of chapter 11 were first essayed in ‘Reading the Walls: Pictorial Dialogue at the British Royal Academy’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 37, no. 4, 2004, pp. 581–604. I also reproduce material and arguments from my catalogue entries and essay ‘Reynolds, Celebrity and the Exhibition Space’, in Martin Postle (ed.), Joshua Reynolds: The Creation of Celebrity, London, 2005. I thank the editors and publishers of all these pieces for supporting their republication in revised form. I also wish to thank Stephen Deuchar for inviting me to become involved in the Tate Britain exhibition that generated the last of these publications, and for his support of my work more generally.

I would like to end by recording my admiration for two remarkable books, which have been my constant companions during the research and writing of this monograph. One is the comprehensive catalogue of Reynolds’s paintings by David Mannings and Martin Postle, published in 2000; the other is the wonderful exhibition catalogue that, edited by Nicholas Penny, accompanied the monumental 1986 Royal Academy display of Reynolds’s works. Both publications set the highest standards of art-historical scholarship, and I have returned to them continually throughout the past decade. Battered, broken-backed but unbowed, they can now look forward to a welcome period of peace on my bookshelves. They thoroughly deserve it.

PAUL MELLON CENTRE FOR STUDIES IN BRITISH ART
LONDON, 22 APRIL 2014

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