More respected than admired

At the Italian seaside last week I flicked through the hotel’s copy of a translation of Gombrich’s Story of Art. The publisher had reproduced Reynolds’s portrait of his friend Giuseppi Baretti to a larger size than any other British picture. ‘Ottimo,’ said the text, and by some odd process of displacement I was all the more happy to read the praise of a favourite picture in Italian.

It is a picture of a short-sighted and unhandsome man squinting at a book, his scrunched sleeve rubbing the velvet of the chair. But to me — and many others — it is one of the greatest examples of male character ever captured with a brush, a piece of cloth, and some wet paint. At my museum we were lucky enough to borrow the picture for an exhibition for eight weeks last autumn. When Baretti was wrapped in bubble-wrap and nailed into a box for the journey home to his (charming) owner I had a lump in the throat, as if it were a living friend one would never see again.