Ramsey Richard Reinagle

RAMSAY RICHARD REINAGLE, RA 1775 – London - 1862 Ramsay Richard Reinagle came from a family of artists of Hungarian descent: his father Philip (1749-1833), sisters Fanny and Charlotte, brother P A Reinagle and son George Philip (1802-1835) were all painters. Ramsay Richard was precocious, exhibiting at the RA for the first time in 1788, at the age of thirteen. He trained with his father and the portrait painter George Hoppner, before travelling in Holland and Italy from 1793-8, where he studied the Old Masters. Upon returning to London, Reinagle worked with the panorama painter Robert Barker in Leicester Square and later at the rival Strand Panorama with Barker's son Thomas Edward Barker, until it went bankrupt in 1816. He continued to exhibit at the RA, painting bravura, broadly-brushed portraits, as well as landscapes of England and Italy influenced by the Old Masters. Reinagle became ARA in 1814 and RA in 1823. He was President of the Society of Painters in Watercolours from 1808-12. For a short time Reinagle was a close friend and mentor of John Constable, and in 1799 painted the famous portrait of him now in the National Portrait Gallery, London. The two fell out over a Ruysdael landscape which they had bought in half shares. Reinagle was adept at copying Old Masters and is said to have undertaken `restoration' work for picture dealers, some of it nearer forgery than conservation. In 1848 Reinagle was discovered to have exhibited a painting by a young artist called J W Yarnold at the RA, altered it somewhat and passed it off as his own. He was forced to resign as an Academician, but exhibited at the RA until 1857 and received a pension from it in his impoverished old age. Engravings after Reinagle's drawings appeared in William Bernard Cooke's The Thames (1811) and John Tillotson's Album of Scottish Scenery (1860). Reinagle wrote the explanatory text for J M W Turner's Views in Sussex (1819).