Sir Joshua Reynolds, the first President of the Royal Academy of Arts in London, was the most celebrated and innovative British portraitist of the eighteenth century. He was acclaimed for transforming portraiture into an art form that had all the ambition, depth and animation of history painting, and that could communicate the most complex personal, psychological and social narratives. This book offers a deeply researched and compellingly written investigation of the portraiture that brought Reynolds such fame. It provides a detailed account of the artist's varied career in a highly competitive marketplace for portraiture, offers close readings of his most striking and intriguing canvases, and pays particular attention to the dynamic ways in which he exploited the new forms of print culture and pictorial display that were emerging in late eighteenth-century Georgian London. -- from dust jacket.