Study of a Lady's Head by an unknown artist; oil on canvas; ca. 1780.

Study in oil depicting the head of a woman in profile.

Purchased from S. Hollyer for £5.00 on 22nd February 1875. A watercolour by G. Barret was purchased from the same person on the same date.

Historical significance: The painting came in to the museum as being eighteenth-century anonymous English School. By the early twentieth century it was attributed to the celebrated portrait painter Sir Joshua Reynolds (1732-1792). A note written in 1927 on the object file from Basil Long suggests that it is in fact a copy after Reynolds.

Sir Joshua Reynolds (1732-1792) was as a painter and first president of the Royal Academy (founded 1768). He was apprenticed in 1740 to the fashionable London portrait painter Thomas Hudson (1701-1779). From 1744 Reynolds began working in both London and Devon. He travelled to Italy with Augustus Keppel. Reynolds stayed mainly in Rome, studying the antique sculpture and old and modern masters there. These works would provide prototypes for his works for the rest of his career. By 1753 Reynolds had returned to London where his portrait of Keppel established his career. From 1769 in his lectures at the RA Reynolds developed his theory of the "Grand Manner", encouraging artists to learn from past examples of art and to work on morally elevating subjects. These ideas had been expressed by earlier artists however Reynolds was the first to deliver them in a clear synthesis. Although Reynolds encouraged artists to paint more highly regarded genres of paintings, ideally History, he remained a portrait painter. During the 1770s he developed within this genre "Fancy Pictures" creating sentimental representations of children. In 1784 he succeeded the artist Allan Ramsay (1713-1784) as portrait painter to King George III (1738-1820).

This sketch is probably related to an unidentified or lost portrait by Reynolds. It is known that Reynolds created oil sketches as part of the preliminary practice for some of his portraits. Mannings and Postle have observed that although sketches made for specific portraits are documented we do not know how these worked in Reynolds’ day-to-day practice. They have proposed that some sketches may have been made by the artist for particular parts of portraits. They have also suggested that studio assistants may have been responsible for the production of these oil sketches (Mannings and Postle, pp.10-11).

The note on file written by Basil Long in 1927 identifies 258-1875 with the Reynolds portrait Lady Cockburn and her three eldest sons (National Gallery, museum number 382) . A comparison of the figures shows that although there is a similarity in the style of dress and the way the loose clothing drapes around the neckline, the sitters are not the same. A bust length portrait, 258-1875 shows a woman against a dark neutral background. She turns her head down and her chin is raised to the left so that she is viewed in profile. The brown dress of the sitter is loosely draped around her shoulders and falls to one side revealing her chemise underneath. The choice of showing this figure in a neutral dress which does not reflect those of the height of contemporary fashion recalls the costume Reynolds used for the female sitters in his allegorical portraits. The hair, worn high on the head and dressed with coils plaits and ringlets is typical of the early to mid1770s. Hair would be worn higher and in more elaborate styles in the next decade. Loose brushstrokes have been used in the painting. The unfinished state of this painting suggests that it is after a preliminary sketch, now lost, made by the artist, for a portrait.

On its acquisition in 1875 Sketch of a woman's head may have been associated as an example of work produced in the style of Reynolds. Even a century after his death, Reynolds was admired as one of the greatest portrait painters of his day and examples of his work or paintings associated with the artist would have been highly regarded. This sketch with its stylistic similarities to the work of Reynolds demonstrates the influence of Reynolds’ works on his contemporaries with artists producing oil sketches in composition and manner similar to his.

258-1875