Stop and Look – Mrs John Musters as Hebe (1784)
Sir Joshua Reynolds, who became President of the Royal Academy in London when it was founded in 1768, is sometimes seen as the incarnation of the idea of an Academy. He was very learned, he uttered lapidary precepts as to what painting is about, and he made portraits of all the great men of his day. And he was a genius when it came to depicting women.
Women were a perennial headache for the fashionable portrait painter. Whereas men could be presented as meaningful actors in the drama of public life – generals or admirals or politicians or farmers – their wives had no function except to produce heirs to their husbands’ professional status, wealth or estates. They were, in a social sense, mere cyphers, but as individuals they might claim beauty and wit – as well as the virtue of motherhood – and those qualities were what the painter had to convey.
Reynolds was brilliant at this. Although he never married to produce heirs of his own, he was a susceptible man, fully aware of the enormous potential a beautiful woman possessed for social influence and distraction. He could suggest the indefinable allure of a sexually attractive woman with often quite unnerving force and directness: the glint of a moist lip, the sparkle of a dark eye, the swell of a white bosom. These were of course the stock in trade of all competent painters, but Reynolds outdoes most of them, past and present.
The Academy he represented so ably wasn’t just a marketplace for artists’ technical skills. It was also, and crucially, the centre of a serious philosophical discipline that argued that a painting should embody universal truths relating to life and our place in the created world. And Reynolds saw that, blank canvases as they were, women could embody some of the broader abstract ideas that men, with their everyday duties and occupations, often could not.
John Musters of Colwick Hall near Nottingham was typical: a characteristic sporting country squire with a passion for horses, he married Sophia Catherine Heywood in 1776, “an exceeding pretty woman”, “the toast of season” in 1779. But how to “pictorialise” that beauty, that social success, in such a way that it was preserved in dignity and even grandeur?
This portrait more than measures up to that brief. It’s conceived on a heroic scale, well over life-size, and with an undercurrent of learned wit that seems to compliment the sitter. As Reynolds presents her Sophia Musters is no mere society belle: she is a denizen of Olympus, Hebe no less, cup-bearer to Jupiter, king of the gods. He appears in the guise of an eagle, taking refreshment out of her hand as she is borne aloft on drifting clouds that create a play of light and shadow across her elegantly poised figure. Her drapery, her hair, flutter in the winds of heaven so that the whole design is balanced as though by conflicting currents of air and light. She gazes out at us with all the confidence of her exalted position, and we feel we know her as the irresistible young cynosure that she was in real life. Perhaps she actually appeared at a fancy-dress ball as Hebe herself?
Andrew Wilton was the first Curator of the Clore Gallery for the Turner Collection at Tate Britain and is the author of many works on the artist.