The Arts Society Wensleydale trip to Harewood House Leeds 20th June 2023

It seemed fitting, in the tricentennial year of Sir Joshua Reynolds’ birth, to visit one of Yorkshire’s best known architectural treasures for an in-depth guided tour of some of his finest work. 

The current exhibition at Harewood House, entitled Reframing Reynolds, allowed us to get up close and personal with six magnificent portraits of the Lascelles family.

In the late seventeen hundreds the Lascelles family were on the up; thanks largely to the hugely profitable triangular trade in sugar, enslaved people and sundry goods including rum and cloth which formed the backbone of their wealth. Harewood House, itself a masterpiece of design by Carr  and Adam, embellished with more Chippendale than one could shake a stick at,  helped to propel the family to the upper echelons of  fashionable society . But not content with this, their public image was further enhanced by the timely arrival on the scene of  Reynolds’ new  'Grand Style' style of portraiture. The Lascelles family were 'nouveau riche’, and looking to project an identity that legitimised and reinforced their new-found wealth, status and power. 

Reynolds skillfully augmented the truth with flatteringly imagined settings and classical allegory to project the desired image of established nobility.  Harewood's portrait of Edwin Lascelles, which gave rise to the phrase ‘costing an arm and a leg’ is the perfect example of this. Reynolds shows us a construct of landed wealth, set in Capability Brown’s tastefully crafted parkland. The sitter admiring his estate and country seat. In reality, we know that Harewood was still a building site at the time and its grounds farmland. The picture is very much a projection of the vision that the sitter had for both himself and Harewood. It also tells us how the sitter wanted his identity to be perceived by both his contemporaries and descendants." 

Now, over 200 years later, a visit to Harewood gave us the opportunity to admire his legacy – in the extraordinary Adam plasterwork,  the very finest collections of furniture and art, and in the beauty and tranquility of both gardens and landscaped parkland he envisaged.  

Earlier this year the present incumbent co-founded the group "Heirs of Slavery" to go some way to make amends in the form of reparations.