Reframing Reynolds: A Celebration Featuring the Portrait of Mrs Elizabeth Field, recently acquired from Philip Mould & Company

This year marks the 300th birth anniversary of one of the most important figures in the history of British portrait painting, Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792).

To celebrate this, The Box in Plymouth has brought together over 30 works by Reynolds for their ‘Reframing Reynolds’ exhibition (on view until 29th October 2023), including a portrait of Mrs Elizabeth Field (c. 1744) which was recently acquired from Philip Mould & Company. The sitter was the sister-in-law of the artist’s uncle the Rev. Joshua Reynolds and it is one of the earliest portraits that can be attributed to Reynolds’s hand. The portrait is presumed to have been painted in Plymouth sometime after Reynolds had left the studio of Thomas Hudson in the summer of 1743 and prior to his return back up to London at the end of 1744.

Following her collaboration with The Box, the Portrait of Mrs Elizabeth Field is also among the three paintings that artist Rana Begum RA has chosen to respond to, giving particular attention to its muted colours, which differentiate this early painting from the other works in the exhibition.

As with this unpretentious application of colour, the sitter is not one of the grand aristocratic ladies whom Reynolds was to paint with such bravura, but is a more modest figure, drawing from the most intimate of Reynolds’s circles in his native Devon. Dating from before Reynolds’s transformative Grand Tour of 1749-1752, moreover, it lacks the conscious – and at times mannered – allusiveness to the works of Italian masters of the likes of Titian, whom Reynolds was later to revere. Instead, it provides an excellent example of Reynolds’s unstudied yet closely observed early manner, when he was most under the influence of his similarly Devon-born master Thomas Hudson (c.1701-1779).