I recently visited the Queen's Gallery in London and the excellent exhibition 'Portrait of the Artist'. Here I was reunited with Johan Zoffany’s painting 'The Academicians of the Royal Academy', a painting I had studied during my Masters dissertation back in 2011. Painted between 1771 and 1772, on the far right stands a rather lonely, aloof figure, dressed in black, the brooding Irish artist Nathaniel Hone. Standing behind the life model, he stares out at the other Academicians and in particular towards Sir Joshua Reynolds, the President of the Academy.
[1] Property of the Royal Collection 'The Academicians of the Royal Academy' by Johan Zoffany 1771-72 (101.1x147.5cm)
My dissertation focused on an almighty artistic feud between Hone and Reynolds and the concept of originality in art. In 1775 Hone caused an Eighteenth-century art scandal when he unveiled his painting The Conjuror at the Royal Academy’s annual exhibition. What made the painting such a scandal was its attempt to accuse Sir Joshua Reynolds of plagiarising Old Master prints. Attacks in art were not necessarily new, with x-ray scans of William Hogarth’s 1757 self-portrait revealing a dog urinating on a pile of Old Master paintings, but Hone’s attack was unique in terms of the deeply personal way in which it challenges the authority of the Academy’s first President.
Much of Hone’s anger in The Conjuror shown below, and much of the thrust of his ingenious and highly scholarly satire, is thus aimed at labeling Reynolds a plagiarist. It is for this reason that art historians such as H.J.M Milne described The Conjuror as nothing short of “a first-class sensation”. Within the painting, the magician figure waves his wand toward the plethora of prints produced after Old Master paintings that bear testimony to Reynolds’ failure to create imaginative compositions. Hone’s Conjuror represents a fundamental challenge to traditional views on originality. This artistic attack on the esteemed president Sir Joshua Reynolds, resulted in Hone's Conjurer to become the first painting to be thrown out of an art institution, and then first to be centre stage of a solo exhibition.
[2] Property of the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin. The Pictorial Conjuror, displaying the Whole Art of Optical Deception 1775 (145x173cm)
Hone's genius in setting up his own solo exhibition to show off his banned work, helped to define his inherent creativity and originality. Unlike in Zoffany's painting of 'the Academicians' he fundamentally believed art was not learned through imitation of models as taught in the Academy’s schools. Reynolds’ close attention to the traditions of art and his lectures as President on discourses on art, had inspired Hone to pick up his palette and paint an imagined scene, in which he would question the exact nature of originality found in Reynolds’ work.
Hone's Conjuror, and the prints floating in the background cleverly point to where Reynolds had clearly copied the ideas, poses and compositions of Old Master works. Hone’s aim was to send a statement to Reynolds that to be original was to create something noticeably new from the ideas of others. It was only by the end of eighteenth-century through truly imaginative paintings like Hone's, when art began to formally attach itself to the importance of originality, a concept that now fundamentally consumes most of the modern art world.