The Infant Samuel
The Infant Samuel c1777 by British Painter Joshua Reynolds (1723 – 1792); who specialized in portrait paintings of the Rococo, Baroque, Neoclassicism, Renaissance, Georgian Periods.
This is a wonderful portrait of the Biblical character Samuel as a child kneeling in prayer as the light of heaven shines upon him.
Samuel was born to Elkanah of Ephraim and Hannah in answer to a prayer from his childless mother, and with his birth, his mother dedicated him into the service of the lord.
This is a retouched digital art old masters reproduction of a public domain image that is available as a canvas print online.
Info Below From Wikipedia.org
Sir Joshua Reynolds PRA FRS FRSA (16 July 1723 – 23 February 1792) was an English painter, specialising in portraits. John Russell said he was one of the major European painters of the 18th century.[1] He promoted the “Grand Style” in painting which depended on idealization of the imperfect. He was a founder and first president of the Royal Academy of Arts, and was knighted by George III in 1769.
Reynolds was born in Plympton, Devon, on 16 July 1723[2] the third son of the Rev. Samuel Reynolds, master of the Plympton Free Grammar School in the town. His father had been a fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, but did not send any of his sons to the university.[3] One of his sisters was Mary Palmer (1716–1794), seven years his senior, author of Devonshire Dialogue, whose fondness for drawing is said to have had much influence on him when a boy.
In 1740 she provided £60, half of the premium paid to Thomas Hudson the portrait-painter, for Joshua’s pupilage, and nine years later advanced money for his expenses in Italy. His other siblings included Frances Reynolds and Elizabeth Johnson.
As a boy, he came under the influence of Zachariah Mudge, whose Platonistic philosophy stayed with him all his life. Reynolds made extracts in his commonplace book from Theophrastus, Plutarch, Seneca, Marcus Antonius, Ovid, William Shakespeare, John Milton, Alexander Pope, John Dryden, Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, Aphra Behn, and passages on art theory by Leonardo da Vinci, Charles Alphonse Du Fresnoy, and André Félibien.
The work that came to have the most influential impact on Reynolds was Jonathan Richardson’s An Essay on the Theory of Painting (1715). Reynolds’ annotated copy was lost for nearly two hundred years until it appeared in a Cambridge bookshop, inscribed with the signature ‘J. Reynolds Pictor’, and is now in the collection of the Royal Academy of Arts, London.