Samuel William Reynolds

Samuel William Reynolds (4 July 1773 – 13 August 1835) was a mezzotint engraver, landscape painter and landscape gardener. Reynolds was a popular engraver in both Britain and France and there are over 400 examples of his work in the National Portrait Gallery in London.

Reynolds was born on 4 July 1773. His father was born in the West Indies, the son of a planter, but, being sent in his youth to England for education, settled there permanently, and married Reynolds' mother, Sarah Hunt.

Reynolds studied in the schools of the Royal Academy, and under the mezzotint engravers Charles Howard Hodges and John Raphael Smith. His earliest dated mezzotint is a portrait of George, Prince of Wales, from May 1794.

In 1797 he engraved a plate of The Relief of Prince Adolphus and Marshal Freytag after Mather Brown, which shows a complete mastery of the art, and during the next twenty years produced many fine works, including The Vulture and Lamb, The Falconer, Leopards, Vulture and Snake, and Heron and Spaniel, all after James Northcote; A Land Storm, after George Morland; portraits of Sir Joshua Reynolds, Sir J. F. Leicester, and Lady Harcourt, after Joshua Reynolds; portraits of Lady Elizabeth Whitbread and the Duchess of Bedford, after John Hoppner; The Jew Merchant, after Rembrandt; and The Rainbow, after Rubens.

He also engraved a large number of portraits and compositions by Dance, Jackson, William Owen (1769–1825), Stephanoff, Bonington, Sir Robert Ker Porter, and others, and was one of the artists employed by Turner on his Liber Studiorum. Reynolds worked with great rapidity, often combining etching, aquatint and stipple engraving techniques with the mezzotint.

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