Sir Joshua Reynolds was the leading portraitist of 18th-century Britain.
He was also the founding President of the Royal Academy.
Reynolds very much saw himself as the heir to the Old Masters tradition.
And being largely self-taught,
he really believed that the best way to emulate
greatness was by studying at first hand,
and so he amassed one of what would become by the time of his death,
one of the greatest collections of paintings,
sculptures, and prints in 18th-century Britain.
Joshua Reynolds had a fantastic eye for a great picture.
I'm here in the National Gallery's conservation studio
with Giovanni Bellini's 'Agony in the Garden',
just before it's hung in the Painters' Paintings exhibition.
When Reynolds bought this painting,
he thought it was the work of Bellini's brother-in-law,
Andrea Mantegna.
Actually, that really wasn't a silly mistake to make.
Nobody knew anything about this type of painting
in the late 18th century.
Reynolds bought this painting because it was an example
of Venetian painting before the work of Titian,
his great artistic hero.
But what he got here was one of the
greatest 15th-century Venetian paintings anywhere in the world,
combining emotion, landscape, and skyscape,
in a way that only Giovanni Bellini has ever been capable of.
Collecting was Reynolds's great passion
and he was very much aspiring to be an artist-collector
in the tradition of Van Dyck, the century before,
for example.
His aim was always to get the best possible examples
that he could of the major European schools.
Reynolds vocally supported the establishment of a national collection of art,
one which would be available not just to artists
but also to everybody who was interested in art.
And although he didn't live to see the foundation of a national collection,
his great friend, Sir George Beaumont,
with whom he shared a great passion for British painting
and the Old Masters,
was one of the principal founders
of the National Gallery.
I think Reynolds would be really pleased
if he could see his portrait bust displayed here
at the National Gallery
alongside the great British painters
and also the Old Master painters
that he so admired including
Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, and Rembrandt.
