Sir Joshua Reynolds, Heads of Angels, 1786

This painting shows the head of five-year-old Lady Frances Gordon from five different angles. Reynolds took the idea from 17th-century Italian painting: in seeking to elevate the genre of portraiture he would borrow motifs or styles from the most admired art of the past. Critics praised Reynolds’s artistic ability. One claimed that, ‘The hand of nature never formed a finer face than this: not like the general run … of cherubims, with ruddy cheeks and round unmeaning faces, but sentiment, expression, and clearness, and warmth of colouring, that all must feel, but which the President of the Royal Academy alone can describe’.

Tate Gallery label, February 2016

A Child’s Portrait in Different Views: ‘Angel’s Heads’

The five year old Lady Frances Gordon sat to Reynolds for this unusual portrait in July and August 1786, and again in March 1787. Reynolds generally had very few portrait appointments during the summer months, reserving this time for work on character studies (known as 'fancy pictures') and subject pictures. It is not perhaps surprising, therefore, that the present composition, which is composed of a series of studies of Frances Gordon's head from five different angles, is far more reminiscent of Reynolds's fancy pictures than his portraits of named sitters.

Frances Isabella Keir Gordon (1782-1831) was the only daughter of Lord William Gordon (1744-1823) and his wife Frances Ingram (1761-1841), second daughter of Charles, 9^th Viscount Irvine (1727-78), who were married on 6 March 1781. Her uncle was Lord George Gordon (1751-93), whose political activities had sparked the anti-Catholic riots of 1780.

Reynolds's principal compositional source for the picture was a red chalk drawing of four cherubs' heads by the Italian seventeenth-century artist, Carlo Maratta (1625-1713), which Reynolds had acquired in 1779 at the studio sale of his master Thomas Hudson (1701-79), and which is now in the British Museum. The first critical notice of the picture appeared in The Times in October 1786, before it was exhibited in public at the Royal Academy. Here The Times observed that the 'grouping of four likenesses of the little cherubic Gordon into one picture, is among the prettiest portrait ideas that have ever been conceived'. Several months later, The World, a newspaper which also kept a close watch on developments in Reynolds's studio, noted that the 'four heads, in one frame, of Lord William Gordon's child, are gone home'. However, a subsequent sitting with Miss Gordon in March 1787 indicates that the painting had in the meantime been returned to Reynolds, not least because in the completed picture there are five heads, rather than four, the additional one presumably being added during the final sitting.

Frances Gordon's mother outlived her daughter by ten years and, on her death in 1841, she presented this picture to the National Gallery. There it was extensively copied, registers of copies kept by the National Gallery from 1846 to 1895 revealing no fewer than 314 full-size copies in oil. The popular appeal of the picture to Victorian taste is also indicated by its reproduction on decorative items, including the cover of an ivory-bound prayer book. Numerous photographic reproductions also exist, with titles such as 'The Cherub Choir'. More recently, an image of the picture was used on a First Day Cover to promote the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children's 'Year of the Child'. Perhaps most unusual is the use of the image in badges awarded to student midwives at St. Mary's Hospital, Manchester.

Sir Joshua Reynolds (July 16, 1723 - February 23, 1792) English Rococo Painter was the most important and influential of 18th century English painters, specialising in portraits and promoting the "Grand Style" in painting which depended on idealization of the imperfect. He was one of the founders and first President of the Royal Academy. George III appreciated his merits and knighted him in 1769.
Reynolds was born in Plympton St Maurice, Devon, on 16 July 1723, and apprenticed in 1740 to the fashionable portrait painter Thomas Hudson, with whom he remained until 1743. From 1749 to 1752, he spent over two years in Italy, mainly in Rome, where he studied the Old Masters and acquired a taste for the "Grand Style". From 1753 on, he lived and worked in London. He became a close friend of Dr Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith, Edmund Burke, Henry Thrale, David Garrick and fellow artist Angelica Kauffmann. He was one of the earliest members of the Royal Society of Arts: he encouraged that society's interest in contemporary art and, with Gainsborough, established the Royal Academy as a spin-out organisation.
Many of his works show children in various states of un-dress. It is unlikely that such an interest would escape criticism in today's world, regardless of artistic merit.
With his rival Thomas Gainsborough, he was the dominant English portraitist of the second half of the 18th century. Reynolds painted in more of an idealized fashion than his rival. Reynolds was a brilliant academic. His lectures (Discourses) on art, delivered at the Royal Academy between 1769 and 1790, are remembered for their sensitivity and perception. In one of these lectures he was of the opinion that "invention, strictly speaking, is little more than a new combination of those images which have been previously gathered and deposited in the memory." In 1789 he lost the sight of his left eye, and on 23 February 1792 he died in his house in Leicester Fields, London. He was buried in St. Paul's Cathedral.

Further Reading:
David Mannings and Martin Postle, Sir Joshua Reynolds. A Complete Catalogue of his Paintings, 2 vols., New Haven and London 2000, vol.1, p.221, vol.2, p.556, fig.1494