SIR, I write with regard to Kate Retford’s review in your March issue (pp.196–97) of the recent exhibition on Sir Joshua Reynolds held at Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery. Her comments on the section of the exhibition dealing with Reynolds’s ‘Legacy’ perhaps do not go far enough to explain why she felt that this section was ‘fragmented and patchy’. In my opinion, what this part of the exhibition lacked was a consideration of what happened to Reynolds’s works within his family still living in Devon during the nineteenth century, but perhaps more interestingly it might have investigated those members of his family who also painted and who made a number of copies of his work. Martin Postle, in his catalogue of the Subject Pictures (in D. Mannings: Sir Joshua Reynolds: A Complete Catalogue of his Paintings, New Haven and London 2000), helpfully includes a section on these family members, but there still remains a lacuna in the scholarship devoted to the problem of family artists and copyists which the Plymouth exhibition could have examined.

In 1856 William Cotton published in London his Sir Joshua Reynolds and his Works, a book that was printed in Plymouth, and he states on p.190:

A remarkable talent for painting seems to have been inherited by the descendants of Sir J. Reynolds. Mrs Gwatkin [Theophila, known always as ‘Offy’] was herself an excellent artist, and copied some of her uncle’s pictures with great success, and her nephew, Joshua Reynolds Gwatkin, has frequently exhibited the productions of his pencil at the Royal Academy. Captain Palmer, of Torrington, received me in his studio, surrounded by works of his own painting: and Mrs Colby, Mrs Price, and Miss Theresa Johnson, great nieces of Sir Joshua, all possessed considerable talents, and painted with delicacy and truth.

I have recently discovered a copy (private library) of Cotton’s 1856 book, which is inscribed to [Mary] Ellen [Theresa] Colby (1830–68) ‘from her affecte brother’, the Revd Frederic [Thomas] Colby D.D. F.S.A. (1827–99). Frederic and Ellen were descended from Reynolds’s sister Mary (1716–94) who was married to John Palmer of Torrington, Devon, through their son the Revd John Palmer, Prebendary of Lincoln (1752–1827) and Jane Johnson (1772–1843), whose daughter Mary Palmer (1795–1860) married Captain Thomas Colby R.N. (1782–1864) of Great Torrington, Devon, who was later one of the Commanders of the Royal Hospital, Greenwich. Ellen Colby died unmarried and was buried in Great Torrington. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this copy of Cotton’s book includes a number of annotations relating to this Palmer family lineage. But much more interestingly, along with annotations on the final pages, which include a list of ‘Subscribers to the Bust of Sir Joshua Reynolds at the Cottonian Library in Plymouth 1861’, there is a page where the annotee – evidently Frederic Colby – has listed ‘Oil Paintings by Mrs Colby’, who of course was his mother:

1. ‘The Shepherdess’ – copy after Sir Joshua Reynolds.

2. Landscape after a paintg by [blank in MS] in possn of W.A. Deane Esq. of Webbery.

3. ‘Beggar Boy’ – after a paintg by Morland in possn of W.A. Deane Esq. of Webbery.

4. Pt. of N[ew] Coll[ege] Window – after Sir J. Reynolds.

5. ‘Russian Lady’ – after a paintg by [blank in MS] in possn of W.A. Deane Esq.

6. ‘Infant Samuel’ – after Sir J. Reynolds.

7. ‘Sir J. Reynolds’ – after Sir J. R. in possn of J. R. Gwatkin Eqe.

8. ‘Mrs Gwatkin’ – after Sir J. R. in possn of Miss Gwatkin.

9. ‘Marquess of Thomond’ – after a painting by Lady Thomond – Miss Gwatkin?

10. ‘Marchioness of Thomond’ – after Sir T. Lawrence – orig. in possn of Miss Gwatkin.

11. ‘Infant Academy’ – after Sir J. R.

12. ‘G. Liddell Eq. – when a boy’.

Mrs Colby does not seem to be mentioned as a copyist of Reynolds’s works in Mannings and Postle, and admittedly is only a footnote to Reynolds’s life, but at least from this unpublished note it can be suggested that the copies of the Virtues for New College, Oxford, could be given to Mary Colby rather than, as they have been traditionally, to ‘Offy’ Gwatkin (Postle; 2113a, 2114a, 2115a, 2116a, 2119a, 2120a and 2121a). How good her five other copies after Reynolds, Lawrence, Morland and Lady Thomond were is a matter for speculation. I have not been able to discover anything about pictures belonging to W.A. Deane (William Anthony Deane J.P., D.L. – a descendant of Reynolds’s sister Elizabeth Johnson) of Webbery – a village located a few miles above Great Torrington in North Devon – although his family acquired the estate there in 1822 from John Cutliffe (who had distinguished himself under Wellington’s command at Waterloo), and owned other property in nearby Alverdiscott (or Alscott), which his family held until the early twentieth century. However, they cannot have been copies of anything important if Frederic Colby left their original authorship as blanks.

At the bottom of p.275 of the book there is the following annotation: ‘A Portrait of Sir Joshua by himself, burnt on wood, is in the possession of Mrs Colby (Mary Palmer)’. As far as I am aware, there is no known self-portrait by Reynolds burnt on wood, and whether this curiosity has survived (with other descendants of the Palmers?) merits investigation. 

Only one other small annotation in the book deserves comment here. On p.276, where six portraits by Miss Frances (Fanny) Reynolds – a noted family artist and copyist, who as the Plymouth catalogue all too briefly notes, lived with Reynolds until he ejected her – are listed as ‘in the possession of the family’ (his italics), Frederic Colby has stated that she painted a portrait of ‘Mary Palmer (Lady Thomond) as a girl with a dove in the possession of her niece, Mary Palmer (Mrs Colby)’, confirming that artistic family members also exchanged their works, and which must have added to the confusion of which family artist was copying whom and when and where. 

Richard Wendorf, in his 1996 book on Reynolds, gives an assessment of Fanny Reynolds’s character, life and work, whom Fanny Burney described as ‘restless, irresolute and tiresome’, and illustrates a couple of works. Although it is well known that Reynolds discouraged his sister from painting in oils, she exhibited two large paintings at the Royal Academy in 1774 and 1775. Worryingly, perhaps, James Northcote remarked (W. Hazlitt, ed.: Conversations of James Northcote, London 1830, p.167) that her pictures ‘were an exact imitation of all his [i.e. Reynolds’s] defects’. W.T. Whitley states that Joseph Moser noted that in Fanny’s London house, when, after her brother’s death, she returned from her exile in Devon, ‘her own works were so numerous that a large house was absolutely necessary’, but assumes that because the four-day sale at Phillips in 1807 was a sale of old masters there was none on offer by Fanny, but of this we cannot be certain. Of Fanny’s known works the portrait of Hannah More at Bristol City Art Gallery could have been included in the Plymouth exhibition as just one example of what Reynolds’s sister’s style was like.

It is worth stating that Dr Frederic Colby published a number of Devon-related books and, in particular, was the compiler of a privately printed book called Pedigrees of Five Devonshire Families: Colby, Coplestone, Reynolds, Palmer and Johnson (Exeter, 1884; appendices 1885 and 1894) in which there are several mentions in unnumbered footnotes of portraits and miniatures by Colby and Reynolds family members (or by Sir Joshua Reynolds himself). As a source for Reynolds’s family this publication appears to have been overlooked in the literature. Colby records the names of the ‘miniature portraits of her own family by Mrs Colby’ (p.2), as well as her oil copies; on p.26 he records a ‘very fine portrait of Mr W. Johnson as a boy by Miss F. Reynolds in the possession of Rev. W. Johnson’ and a portrait of his wife ‘by the same artist in the possession of Miss Yonge’; on p.27 ‘a portrait of Miss Yonge as a baby by Miss F. Reynolds’; on p.29 ‘a portrait of Mrs Deane by Miss F. Reynolds in the possession of the Yonge family’; and finally ‘a portrait of Mrs Furse by Miss F. Reynolds in the possession of Canon Furse’ (p.30). Colby was evidently keen to record that there were many portraits by Mrs Colby and Fanny Reynolds in the possession of family members, and he also states that he and Canon Furse owned pictures by Reynolds’s pupil James Northcote.