Joshua reynolds

At the National Portrait Gallery in London, you will find the Portrait of Mai (Omai), circa 1753-80, painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds around 1776. Reynolds's depiction of Mai, the first Polynesian to visit Britain, marks the first British painting to portray a person of colour with dignity and grandeur. Known as “Omai” in England, Mai (ca. 1753-1779) was a native of Raiatea, an island now part of French Polynesia, who travelled from Tahiti to England with Captain James Cook. He spent the years…

Joshua Reynolds - Mrs Abington as the Comic Muse - oil on canvas - Waddesdon

Mrs Siddons as the Tragic Muse by Joshua Reynolds, 1789. Oil on canvas.

Portrait of Elizabeth Falconer, Mrs. Stanhope, as Contemplation, three-quarter-length, in a white satin dress, before a draped curtain

Category:Female portraits by Joshua Reynolds - Wikimedia Commons

In the tableaux vivants scene of Edith Wharton's House of Mirth, Lily Bart's posture announces that she is herself as a work of art. She stands on display, showing what she has, and the moment at which she is most herself is also the one in which she most becomes a thing, an object consumed by those eyes, and consumed perhaps in other ways as well. For art is often sold. Lily has here turned herself into a commodity, and poses as if she’s up for auction. The scene works to literalize the…

Joshua Reynolds

Emily Warren, also known as Emily Bertie Pott, was an eighteenth-century courtesan. Stunningly beautiful, she left the London slums of her birth behind...

Category:Female portraits by Joshua Reynolds - Wikimedia Commons