Studio: international art (55.1912)

Sir George Reid's Portraits

some time at The Hague with his friend Josef
Israels.

The young Scotsman was not long in attracting
the attention of his contemporaries by the strength
and vigour of his portraits and the unerring
capacity of securing a likeness, of which we have
spoken. His election to the Associateship of the
Royalj Scottish Academy took place in 1870, to
the full membership in 1877. Seven years later he
took up his residence in the Scottish capital, and
in 1891 succeeded Sir William Fettes Douglas as
President of the Academy. This post he held till
1902, when he resigned, and was succeeded by Sir
James Guthrie.

Like Raeburn, Sir George Reid’s field of action
has not been confined to his native country.
Since his resignation of the Presidency in 1902 he
has lived a great deal in London, and has painted
many men in the public services, in Parliamentary
life, the Church, law, medicine, science, and
letters. In fact, most of his recent portraits have
been executed in England, the more notable of
which have been those of the present Lord Chan-
cellor, Lord Loreburn, and
his predecessor, Lord Hals-
bury, and that of the Bishop
of Salisbury.

Sir George Reid is ex-
clusively a painter of men.

We cannot recall a portrait
of a woman. This fact is
indicative of the metier of
the painter and of the limi-
tations of his masterly art.

For if there be one note
more than another which
predominates in Sir George
Reid’s work it is virility,
the masculine element as
opposed to the feminine.

There is nothing over-suave,
tender, delicate, or diffident
in the psychological note.

It is manhood writ large,
manhood at its most asser-
tive phase, often verging
into challenge and defiance.

There is no limp lay figure
within the clothes, no putty
vertebrre, no anremic blood.

Sir George Reid seems to
glory in uncommon strength,
to present a man rejoicing
in his manhood, trenchant,

170

assertive, occasionally even fierce. Ruskin in his
“ Aratra Pentelici ” pointed out how different were
the plastic presentations of the Greeks in time of
war and in periods of peace—how in time of war
the hair was ruffled and tossed; in peace, smooth
and straight. If the analogy would hold good, Sir
George Reid’s men are out for war, all their vigour
and potential force are summoned to the front.
They are men in a world of action, not in a world
of dreams. When he painted John Stuart Blackie
for the Scottish National Collections, he presented
him not as the thoughtful scholar of the study, but
as the man of fire of the public platform hurling
epigrammatic thunderbolts at his southern neigh-
bours. He did not pause to inquire which elements
in Professor Blackie were the most essential in that
complex character ; he seized the one that was most
evident to him, and which, in Blackie’s case at least,
was most in accord with the popular conception of
the man. The delicate undercurrents of tender-
ness and poetry are intentionally neglected so as
not to interfere with the presentation of the man
as Happy Warrior, a designation which Blackie

THE RT. REV. JAMES MOORHOUSE, D. D. (BISHOP OF MANCHESTER, 1886-1903)
BY SIR GEORGE REID