page_title: Robert Lovell Gwatkin
section_title: Reynolds legacy
hierarchical_section_title: Robert Lovell Gwatkin / Reynolds legacy
caption_attribution_description: Caption from the museum This picture, presented to the National Gallery in 1847, and subsequently transferred to Tate in 1951, has for many years been among Reynolds's best known works. In the nineteenth century it was deeply admired and frequently copied, National Gallery records revealing that between its acquisition and the end of the century no fewer than 323 full-scale copies in oil were made. The picture was not a commissioned portrait but a character study, or 'fancy picture', as the genre was known in the eighteenth century. The present title was not invented by Reynolds, but derives from an engraving of 1794, the second impression of which was inscribed 'The Age of Innocence'. Traditionally, it is has been thought that the picture was painted in 1788. However, it is very probably identifiable with a work exhibited by Reynolds at the Royal Academy in 1785, and entitled simply 'a little girl'. On 8 April 1785 The Morning Herald, previewing Reynolds's proposed exhibits for the forthcoming Royal Academy exhibition, noted: 'An Infant Girl, disposed on a grass plat in an easy attitude. The companion to it is a girl fondling a bird. These subjects are fancy studies of Sir Joshua's and do him honour'.
context_page_description: Robert Lovell Gwatkin was an English landowner, High Sheriff of Cornwall in 1789.
context_section_description: Gwatkin bought in 1821, after the death of his sister-in-law, the Marchioness of Thomond, two of the sketch-books of Reynolds, and had Joseph Skelton create facsimiles. Editions of sketch-books were later published in works by William Cotton (1859), and as revised by Charles Robert Leslie with Tom Taylor.
  Benjamin Robert Haydon travelled in 1845 to Plymouth, to see Theophila Gwatkin and consult the Reynolds papers. He was researching the reason why Reynolds briefly resigned from the Royal Academy, in 1790. She corrected some reminiscences of James Northcote of his life as a Reynolds apprentice.
  In the 1850s, 19 pocket books (sitter books) by Reynolds were owned by Miss Gwatkin of Princess Square, Plymouth. She possessed a number of Reynolds portraits. and she also passed on Reynolds's memoir of his friend Samuel Johnson, published by Leslie and Taylor. Ledgers of Reynolds passed to Theophila and then John Reynolds Gwatkin. He sold them in 1873 to Henry Graves, who passed them to his son Algernon Graves. Charles Fairfax Murray bought them from Algernon Graves in 1904, and gave them to the Fitzwilliam Museum in 1916.
caption: Reynolds "The Age of Innocence" there is unproven speculation the sitter was Theophila Gwatkin
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