Reynolds produced some of the finest portraits of the 18th century – and a few of the silliest

On Monday 21 April 1760 Joshua Reynolds had a busy day. Through the morning and the afternoon he had a series of sitters. Each of these stayed for an hour in the painter’s premises on St Martin’s Lane and was no doubt ‘greatly entertained’ — as another of Reynolds’s clients recorded — by watching the progress of their portraits in a large looking-glass strategically placed behind the easel so the subject could view the artist at work. However, Mark Hallett suggests in this masterly and pioneering new study of Reynolds at work, the most interesting hour of the day would have begun at one o’clock.

That was the time at which the Revd Laurence Sterne arrived for his appointment. The resulting picture, now in the National Portrait Gallery, is a splendid example of the subject Hallett has set himself: Reynolds’s portraiture in action. This is not a biography — though it progresses from Reynolds’s birth on 9 July 1723, son of a clergyman in Devon — ‘about ½ an hour after 9 in the morning’ — to his funeral in 1792, the latter being a grand public occasion, with a lying in state in the Life-Room at the Royal Academy in Somerset House followed by a solemn procession to St Paul’s Cathedral.