© Tate 2006, all rights reserved
Purchased from a private collector (Building the Tate Collection fund)
with assistance from the National Heritage Memorial Fund, Tate Members,
National Art Collections Fund (with a contribution from the Wolfson
Foundation) and other donors 2005
T12033
This double full-length portrait is among Joshua Reynolds’s most important and visually impressive portraits. When Reynolds exhibited the painting at the Royal Academy in 1770, he entitled it The Portraits of Two Gentlemen: Whole Lengths. Since then it has become better known simply as The Archers. The picture depicts two young aristocrats: Dudley Alexander Sydney Cosby, Lord Sydney (1732–74), shown on the left, and Colonel John Dyke Acland (1746–78). Colonel Acland was a politician and soldier who fought in the war against the American colonists. Lord Sydney pursued a diplomatic career until his death by suicide in 1774. In Reynolds’ portrait they are dashing through a forest as if taking part in a Renaissance hunt. They are wearing quasi-historical dress and leave a trail of dead deer and game in their wake. In The Archers Reynolds drew particularly upon the visual language of Titian’s late poesie, or mythological subjects, notably his great composition The Death of Actaeon (National Gallery, London) from which the hunting motif may well have been derived. The Archers, in its extravagant composition and animated figures, also recalls the tradition of grand Baroque hunting scenes, and the pile of dead game is modelled upon a picture by the Flemish animal and still-life painter Frans Snyders, now in the collection of the Hunterian Museum, Glasgow. Through The Archers Reynolds revealed brilliantly his ambition to elevate society portraiture to the level of history painting, and his close affiliation with the traditions of European art.
Joshua
Reynolds
Andrea
Soldi
Richard
Parkes Bonington
Richard
Dadd