Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 20.djvu/522

Rh 504 R H A R H the occupation of his mere bye hours and times of leisure. The main effort of his life was directed to painting, a pursuit which, as he was never weary of impressing on younger artists, was enough to occupy a man's whole time, even were it longer than it is, and to call forth his utmost energy. The unceasing application, perseverance, and assiduity which form the recurrent burden of Reynold's discourses found the most complete illustration in his own career. He laid it down as a distinct principle that each fresh portrait to which he set his hand should excel the last, arid no effort was wanting to realize this aim. In his search for perfection he would paint and repaint a subject ; when a visitor asked how a certain portion of the infant Hercules had been executed, he replied, " How can 1 tell ! There are ten pictures below this, some bettor, some worse." A method like this contrasts curiously with the swift certainty of Gainsborough's practice, but it must be confessed that the produc- tions of Reynolds have an abiding charm that is wanting in the exquisite but slighter and more mannered work of his great rival. In range, too, of subject, as well as of method, the art of Sir Joshua has by far the wider reach. "How various the man is," said Gainsborough once, after he had been examining the president's portraits hung in an Academy exhibition ; and the remark gains an added point and emphasis when we compare the paintings of Reynolds with Gainsborough's own. In the work which the painter produced shortly after his return from Italy in the Lady Cathcart and her Daughter of 1755, the Lady Elizabeth Montague and the George, Earl of Warwick, of 1756, and the Countess of Hyndford of 1757 we find a certain dignity and elegance of pose and arrangement which bears witness to his foreign studies, joined to some coldness of colour, hardness of execution, and insistance on definiteness of outline, which con- trasts with the sweet felicity and tenderness of his fully developed manner, with its perfect colour, and its form which is lost and found again in an exquisite mystery. But soon all that is tenta- tive and immature disappears from his works. In 1758 we have the gracious and winning full-length of Elizabeth Gunning, Duchess of Hamilton, and the stately Duke of Cumberland, followed in 1760 by the Kitty Fisher, and a host of admirable portraits in which the men and women and children of the time live still before our eyes, each possessed with a nameless dignity, or grace, or sweetness. As the artist advanced towards old age his hand only gained in power, his colour in richness and splendour ; his works show no decadence till the day when he finally laid aside his brush. We have nothing finer from his hand than the Mrs Nesbitt as Circe of 1781, the Mrs Siddons as The Tragic Muse of 1784, the Duchess of Devonshire and her Child of 1786, and the Infant Hercules and the Miss Gawtkin as Simplicity of 1788. In the midst of his constant practice as a portrait-painter Reynolds was true to his early admiration of "the grand style," to his veneration for the old masters of Italy, to his belief that the imaginative paths which these men pursued were the highest ways of art. At the conclusion of his last Academy discourse, while speaking of Michelangelo, he breaks forth with uncontrollable emotion, "Were I now to begin the world again, I would tread in the steps of that great master ; to kiss the hem of his garment, to catch the slightest of his perfections, would be glory and dis- tinction enough for an ambitious man." From the Italians Reynolds conveyed into his own portrait- subjects a dignity and a grace, along with a power of colour, which were previously unknown in English art ; but he essayed also to follow them into their own exalted and imaginative paths, to paint Holy Families and Nativities, to picture the cardinal virtues, and to realize the conceptions of the poets. But the English portrait- painter wanted the visionary power necessary for such tasks ; his productions of this class form the least interesting portion of his work. They are most successful when the symbolism and the allegory in them are of the slightest, when the human element is the main attraction, when he paints as cherub faces five different views of the countenance of one living English girl, or titles as "Simplicity" his portrait of Offy Gawtkin or as "Hebe" his portrait of Miss Meyer. His series of " The Virtues," designed for the window of New College, Oxford, show simply studies of grace- ful women, lightly draped, and pleasantly posed. His Macbeth and his Cardinal Beaufort have no real impressiveness, no true terror ; and the finest of the subjects that he painted for Boydell's Shakespeare is the Puck, in which the artist's inspiration was caught, not from the realms of imagination or fancy, but from observation of the child nature which he knew and loved. Much has been said regarding the recklessness and want of care for permanency which characterized the technical methods of Sir Joshua. While he insisted that his pupils should follow only such ways of work as were well known anil had been tested by time, he was himself most varying and unsettled in his practice. In his earnest desire for excellence he tried all known processes, and made all kiuds of fantastic experiments. He was firmly convinced that the old masters were possessed of technical secrets which had been lost in later times, and he even scraped the surfaces from portions of valuable works by Titian and Rubens in the vain attempt to probe the mystery. In his efforts to attain the utmost possible power and brilliancy of hue he made use of pigments which are admittedly the reverse of stable and permanent, he worked with dangerous vehicles, he employed both colours and varnishes which in combination are antagonistic. Orpiment was mingled with white lead ; wax-medium, egg-varnish, and asphaltum were freely used ; and, when we read the account of his strangely Imp-hazard methods, we are ready to echo Haydon's exclamation "The wonder is that the picture did not crack beneath the brush !" and are prepared for such a sight of the vanishing ghosts of master- pieces as was afforded by so many works in the Reynolds Exhibition at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1884. Our only consolation lies in the truth expressed by Sir George Beaumont, when his recommen- dation of Sir Joshua for the execution of a certain work was met by the objection that his colours faded, that he " made his pictures die before the man." "Never mind," said Sir George, " a faded portrait by Reynolds is better than a fresh one by anybody else." See Malone, The Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds, Knight (3 vols., 1798); North- cote, Memoirs of Sir Joshua Reynolds, Knight, <tc. (1813); Farrir.gton, Memoirs of the Life of Sir Joshua Reynolds (1819) ; Beechy, Literary Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds (1835); Cotton, Sir Joshua Reynolds and his Workt (edited by Burnet, 1856); Leslie and Taylor, Life and Times of Sir Joshua Jleynoldt (2 vols. 1865); and Redgrave, A Century of English Painters, vol. i. (1S6G). (J. M. G.) KHADAMANTHUS, in Greek mythology, a son of Zeus and Europa and brother of Minos, king of Crete. At first he helped his brother to rule his island empire. His justice earned him the admiration of his subjects and the jealousy of his brother, wherefore he fled to Boeotia, where he wedded Alcmene. On account of his inflexible integrity he was made one of the judges of the dead in the other world. According to Plato, Rhadamanthus judged the souls of Asiatics, while ./Eacus judged those of Europeans, and when they could not agree Minos had a casting vote. RELETIA was the name given in ancient times to a province of the Roman empire, which included a consider- able tract of the Alpine regions that separated the great valleys of the Po and the Danube, comprising the districts occupied in modern times by the Grisons and the Austrian province of Tyrol. Before their subjugation by Rome the Rhsetians are described as one of the most powerful and warlike of the Alpine tribes; but little or nothing is known as to their origin and history. It is indeed stated distinctly by Livy (v. 33) that they were of Etruscan origin, and a tradition reported by Justin (xx. 5) and Pliny (H.N., iii. 24, 133) affirmed that they were a portion of that people who had been settled in the plains of the Po and were driven into the mountains by the irruption of the Gauls, when they assumed the name of Rhsetians from a leader of the name of Rhsetus. Very little value can, however, be attached to such traditions, and the attempts of some modern writers to support them by philological researches have led to no satisfactory result. But the ethnical connexion of the Rhaetians with the Etruscans has been accepted by Nisbuhr, and its general reception by the Romans would seem to prove that they were a distinct race from their neighbours the Ligurians as well as from the Gauls and Germans. The name of the Rhsetians is first mentioned by Polybius, but merely incidentally, and they played no part in Roman history till after the fall of the republic. It is certain, however, that they continued virtually independent until Augustus undertook their subjugation, in common with that of the neighbouring Alpine tribes bordering upon Italy. The importance he attached to this task is shown by his having deputed its execution to his two step-sons, Drusus and Tiberius, who in a single campaign reduced them all to subjection (15 B.C.), so that their territory was shortly after incorporated as a province in the Roman empire and their name never again appears in history. The exploits of the imperial youths on this occasion have been immortalized in two well-known odes of Horace (Od., iv. 4 and 14). In the time of Strabo their territory was considered as extending from the Lakes of Como and Garda to that of Constance (the Lacus Brigantinus), while the allied people of the Vindelici, who had shared in their