Perhaps the most important figure in the history of English painting, Sir Joshua Reynolds was a painter, writer, and first president of the Royal Academy. Reynolds, who received no academic training, was strongly influenced by ancient Roman art and Renaissance masters such as Raphael, Michelangelo, and Titian, whom he studied during a stay in Italy. In his influential Discourses Delivered at the Royal Academy and in his paintings, Reynolds sets forth his philosophy and practice of painting, his “Great Style” emphasizing idealized standards of beauty based on the art and literature of the past. The leading portraitist of his day, Reynolds achieved his greatest success in the 1770s with works such as Mrs. Elisha Mathew.
Reynolds depicted Mrs. Elisha Mathew outdoors. She wears a magnificent shot-silk dress with a long strand of pearls. In the fashion of the day, her hair is swept up, her cheeks are rosy, and a birthmark appears near her left eye. As Mrs. Mathew moves gracefully through the landscape, a spaniel bounds at her feet.
Born in Ireland, Elisha Smyth Mathew was celebrated for her splendid looks. In 1761, when she was only fifteen, Horace Walpole admired her as “a most perfect beauty.” In September 1776, when she was the wife of Francis Mathew, a member of Parliament, Elisha Mathew was listed in the London Chronicle as one among twelve noted English and Irish beauties. She died at sea in 1781 on a journey between Paris and Ireland, and her funeral at Tipperary, Ireland, was a grand event. One magazine reported that the funeral procession was nearly five miles long and included 150 mourning coaches and hundreds of servants. “The aged, the young, and infant tears were shed for the death of this beauteous, worthy, and accomplished woman.”
Exemplifying Reynolds’s “Great Style,” Mrs. Mathew is presented as an idealized beauty, moving gracefully through a landscape, framed by a tree at the right. This is a generalized view of nature, not a specific place, and Mrs. Mathew did not actually pose outdoors. In his portraits of women, Reynolds combined truth with fiction to create images that are explicitly flattering. He endows Mrs. Mathew with unusual glamour and poise that are enhanced by the folds and highlights in her beautifully painted dress. The dog leaping at Mrs. Mathew’s side further accentuates her graceful movement, serene calm, and elevated social status and breeding.
This large portrait was probably intended to hang in a grand reception room. At this time, Reynolds charged more for a full-length portrait than any other painter. He received half his fee, a payment of 75 pounds, on July 15, 1777, probably at the time of Mrs. Mathew’s first sitting, and exhibited the painting at the Academy in 1778. Payment for this portrait was never completed, and the painting remained in Reynolds’s studio until his death.
