Practice Makes Imperfect: Reynolds's Painting Technique

Volume 35 of the Technical Bulletin is a special edition devoted to the techniques and materials used by Sir Joshua Reynolds, one of the most successful of British portraitists and from 1768, first President of the Royal Academy in London. It was well known in his day that paintings by Reynolds were fragile and vulnerable to change, and that his flesh paints had a notorious tendency to fade. It was only later in his career that he attempted, with mixed success, to modify his technique to reduce the rapid deterioration of his works.

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