With Reynolds: Portraiture in Action, Mark Hallett, director of studies at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, has written a broadly comprehensive yet also meticulously in-depth study of the portraits painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds. The genesis for the book can be traced to Hallett's earlier work, The Spectacle of Difference: Graphic Satire in the Age of Hogarth (1999). In that study, Hallett's successful exploration of Hogarth's satirical prints as “sites of cultural production” (The Spectacle of Difference, x) connected to the wider conventions and functions of graphic satire in eighteenth-century London and dynamically engaged in pictorial and textual conversations about contemporary issues.

A similarly thorough contextual approach appeared in Hallett's initial research on Reynolds in “Reading the Walls: Pictorial Dialogue at the British Royal Academy” (Eighteenth-Century Studies 37, no. 4 [Summer 2004]: 581–604) and in his essay and entries contributed to the 2005 Tate Britain exhibition catalogue, Joshua Reynolds: The Creation of Celebrity. In these publications, Hallett recognized Reynolds's portraits of noteworthy personalities for public and private exhibition spaces as engaging in contemporary conversations about celebrities whose names and deeds were shaped by other painted portraits and parallel visual and textual developments in prints, newspapers, and magazines.

Hallett's attention to the interactive nature of portraiture has been fully realized in the richly illustrated Reynolds: Portraiture in Action, the result of at least ten years of research and writing. While acknowledging previous scholarship, in particular the catalogue raisonné compiled by David Mannings and Martin Postle, with whom he collaborated on the 2005 Tate Britain exhibition, Hallett makes clear that he intends to situate Reynolds's portraits in the studio, showroom, exhibition venues, domestic spaces, and print shops where they served as animated visual sources inviting dynamic interpretations from a wide range of viewers.

With this goal in mind, Hallett's methodology depends, in part, on a nuanced reading of contemporary critical responses to Reynolds's portraiture. Hallett points especially to the praise Reynolds enjoyed for the successful “animation” (18) of his sitters, which leads him to look at the parade of portrayed men, women, and children as real people who “act out and express ideas, emotional states and biographical narratives” that viewers were “to imaginatively reconstruct, meditate upon, and empathise with” (18). Additional evidence for this understanding of eighteenth-century portraiture comes from the theoretical writings of Jonathan Richardson, who recognized portraiture's capability to serve as a pictorial source for “psychological, biographical and historical” narratives that the engaged viewer constructs in the context of a cultural understanding of that individual (19, 35–37).

In a preliminary consideration of Reynolds's training, Hallett demonstrates how the artist discovered metaphor and narrative in Italy. Between 1750 and 1752, Reynolds executed copies of old master paintings and delightfully comical caricatures, which revealed the exaggerated physical and personal characteristics of contemporaries. According to Hallett, these figural and compositional studies served Reynolds as he enhanced the dynamism of his convincing likenesses of male and female sitters of all ages. In the remainder of the book, Hallett turns his attentions to a chronological consideration of Reynolds's portrait production as a carefully choreographed array of personalities from high society and the demimonde, from the stage and the battlefield, and from the church and the literary circles that the artist knew so well.

According to Hallett, pictorial strategies that enhance the performative and multidimensional nature of his sitters enliven Reynolds's portraits from the 1750s and 1760s. For example, in his particularly vivid investigation of Reynolds's portrait of his friend and naval commander Augustus Keppel, Hallett shows how the artist maintained pictorial connections to conventional portraiture while at the same time he animated the figure with an active pose and gestures borrowed from classical sculpture and paintings of heroic masculinity by Raphael and Reni. Moreover, Reynolds introduced a dramatic newsworthy event by showing the wreck of Keppel's ship in the choppy sea of the background. In this way, Reynolds's work presents recognizable conventions of meaning and also asks viewers to construct contemporary connotations. Hallett ably recognizes these two “models of practice,” displaying meaning and inviting reception, in Reynolds's portraits of men, particularly the “mixture of pictorial signs” evident in the representation of Sir Jeffrey Amherst, and in his role-playing pictures of aristocratic women that fuse conventional forms of fashionable portraiture with classical mythology.

Turning his attention to the exhibitions at the Royal Academy, Hallett convincingly argues that Reynolds intended his full-length portraits of female sitters to relate to each other in the exhibition room and for viewers to make associations and comparisons not only during the show but also from one year to the next. For example, Hallett examines how Reynolds showed both the daring portrayal of the Duchess of Cumberland and the introspective figure of Mrs. John Parker in 1773 to invite contrasts and reveal the diverse roles played by contemporary women.

This interaction of Reynolds's portrayed personalities is skillfully acknowledged and demonstrated throughout Hallett's book when considering both public and private venues. The sketches of the great room at Somerset House by Edward Francis Burney allow Hallett to explore many pictorial associations, including the juxtaposition of the demurely domestic Waldegrave sisters and the active male explorer Lord Richard Davendish. Hallett also looks to the installation of Reynolds's portraits of famous men in Hester Thrale's library at Streatham Park and the Marlborough Family portrait at Blenheim Palace. Hallett thoroughly establishes the character of these settings where the portraits displayed multivalent codes of meaning and engaged in conversation with their surroundings.

In his 1965 study of Sarah Siddons, Robert R. Wark noted how Reynolds understood that “association and suggestion can be important factors in our reactions to a work of art” (Sir Joshua Reynolds’ Portrait of Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse, 12). Considering the same painting, Hallett extends the range of associative sources to include contemporary literature, prints, and press reports in order to examine comparative reactions to the paintings of Mrs. Siddons and another actress, Frances Abington, which were exhibited by Reynolds in 1784. Here and throughout his monumental study, Hallett recreates the connotations that Reynolds's portraits once generated, contributing to a fuller understanding of the artist's body of work.