Friday, January 10, 2025

 

ESSAY - "PRESERVE THE MOST PERFECT BEAUTY", SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS

BY DONOVAN BALDWIN

I am still (quite slowly) reading my way through "Seven Discourses on Art" (1772) by Sir Joshua Reynolds.

Once or twice I have previously taken thoughts of his and, in general, if not agreeing with them, at least, using them as starting points for other comments.

However, I have to specifically disagree with Sir Joshua on this one, "If you mean to preserve the most perfect beauty in its most perfect state, you cannot express the passions, which produce (all of them) distortion and deformity, more or less, in the most beautiful faces."

I CAN understand, in his era an artist's representation of a face in a stylized manner WAS the cat's meow. There was even a time when I might have agreed with him (and had a lot fewer years and wrinkles and scars).

Even more so, however, I have come to believe that many of the "passions", some of which ARE ugly, are also what help make us "human"... I like humans. I think I would rather see a passionate human, than a stylized one.

Sorry, Sir Joshua.

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# posted by Donovan Baldwin @ 11:26 AM
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