Description

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Philip Reinagle RA (1749 – November 27, 1833) was an English animal, landscape and botanical painter. The son of a Hungarian musician living in Edinburgh, Reinagle came to London in 1763 and after following an internship, he later became a member of the Royal Academy. He studied at the Royal Academy in 1769 and later became a student of Allan Ramsay, assisting with his numerous portraits of George III and Queen Charlotte. He exhibited for the first time at the Royal Academy in 1773. The works he showed were almost all portraits until 1785, when the monotonous work of making replicas of royal portraits seemed to give him an aversion to portrait photography and led him to to leave for animal painting. He became very successful in his portrayal of sporting dogs, especially spaniels, of birds and of dead game. In 1787, however, he showed a view from Brackendale Hill, Norfolk, at the academy, and from that moment on his landscapes were mainly exhibited. He was elected a staff member of the Royal Academy in 1787, but did not become an academic until 1812, when he presented his diploma in work: an eagle and a vulture fighting a hyena. He also regularly exhibited at the British Institution. Reinagle was also an accomplished copyist of the Dutch masters, and his reproductions of cattle pieces and landscapes by Paul Potter, Ruisdael, Hobbema, Berchem, Wouwerman, Adriaen van de Velde, Karel Dujardin and others are often published as originals. He also made some drawings for Robert John Thornton’s new illustration of the sexual system of Linnaeus (1799-1807) and for his philosophy of botany (1809-10); but his best drawings for book illustration were those of dogs for the Sportsman’s Cabinet by William Taplin (1803) engraved by John Scott. Reinagle died at 5 York Place, Chelsea, London, on November 27, 1833, aged 84 years. A drawing of him, ‘Fox-hunting the death’, is in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum.