Over the last decade at least, ever since he was involved in the organisation of Tate Britain’s exhibition ‘Joshua Reynolds: The Creation of Celebrity’ in 2005, Mark Hallett, the recently appointed director of studies at the Paul Mellon Centre, has been working on a new study of Reynolds’s paintings. It has now been handsomely published by Yale University Press and is a major and deeply serious work, informed by all the latest scholarship in the field of 18th-century studies.

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