Graham Reynolds (art historian)

Arthur Graham Reynolds, OBE CVO FBA, (1914 – 13 October 2013) was an English art historian who was Keeper of Paintings at the Victoria and Albert Museum. He was a leading expert on portrait miniatures and the art of John Constable, for whose works he wrote the catalogue raisonné. Reynolds's approach exemplified traditional scholarship and connoisseurship and he was fiercely opposed to the New Art History of the 1970s.

Arthur Graham Reynolds was born in Highgate, London, in 1914. He attended Highgate School on a scholarship and subsequently went up to Queen's College, University of Cambridge, to read mathematics but switched to English literature.

Reynolds joined the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in 1937, rising to the position of Keeper of the department of prints and drawings (replacing James Laver) and also of paintings with only a break during the Second World War when he worked for the Ministry of Home Security (1939–1945). He became a leading expert on portrait miniatures and the art of John Constable. In 1968 he was a visiting professor at Yale University.

Early in his career Reynolds wrote a résumé of the life and work of Thomas Bewick (1949), a work on Elizabethan and Jacobean costume and a book on English portrait miniatures (1952) that was revised and reissued by Cambridge University Press in 1988. In 1953 he produced a survey of Victorian painting. He wrote two of the Thames & Hudson World of Art series, Turner in 1969 and A concise history of watercolours in 1971. In 1960 he produced a catalogue of paintings by Constable in the V&A, which was issued in a revised edition in 1973. His catalogue raisonne of the paintings of John Constable was published in two parts (two volumes each) in 1984 and 1996, divided at 1816, the year of Constable's marriage to Maria Bicknell.

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