Joshua Reynolds's "Nice Chymistry": action and accident in the 1770s

• Autores: Matthew C. Hunter
• Localización: Art bulletin, ISSN 0004-3079, Vol. 97, Nº 1, 2015, págs. 58-76
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • The first president of Britain's Royal Academy of Arts, Joshua Reynolds was described by contemporaries as a dangerously misguided chemist. Using a secretive laboratory of fugitive materials, he crafted visually striking images that came together quickly and stopped audiences dead in their tracks. But, just as rapidly, those paintings began to deteriorate as objects -flaking, discoloring, visible altering in time. When framed around the "nice chymistry" he prescribed for aspiring artists in his famous "Discourses", Reynolds's risky pictorial enterprise can be situated within a broader problematic of making and thinking with temporally evolving chemical images in the later eigthrrnth century.