Philip Reinagle – Biographical Notes

BORN: 1749
DIED: Nov 27, 1833
SON: Richard Ramsay Reinagle (b. 1775 d. 1862, his father’s student, mimics his style)

[from Dictionary of national biography, published by London, Smith, Elder, & co. 1896]

REINAGLE, PHILIP (1749-1833), animal and landscape painter, was born in 1749. He entered the schools of the Royal
Academy in 1769, and afterwards became a pupil of Allan Ramsay (1713-1784) [q. v.], whom he assisted in the numerous portraits of George III and Queen Charlotte. He exhibited first at the Royal Academy in 1773, sending portraits almost exclusively until 1785, when the monotonous work of producing replicas of royal portraits appears to have given him a distaste for portraiture, and to have led him to abandon it for animal painting. He became very successful in his treatment of sporting dogs, especially spaniels, of birds, and of dead game. In 1785, however, he sent to the academy a “View taken from Brackendale Hill, Norfolk,” and from that time his exhibited works were chiefly landscapes. He was elected an associate of the Royal Academy in 1787, but did not become an academician until 1812, when he presented as his diploma picture “An Eagle and a Vulture disputing with a Hyena.” He likewise exhibited frequently at the British Institution. Reinagle was also an accomplished copyist of the Dutch masters, and his reproductions of the cattle-pieces and landscapes of Paul Potter, Ruysdael, Hobbema, Berchem, Wouwerman, Adriaan van de Velde, Karel Du Jardin, and others have often been passed off as originals. He also made some of the drawings for Dr. Thornton’s “New Illustration of the Sexual System of Linnaeus,” 1799-1807 [also known as “Temple of Flora”], and for his “Philosophy of Botany,” 1809-10; but his best drawings for book illustration were those of dogs for Taplin’s “Sportsman’s Cabinet,”1803, which were admirably engraved by John Scott.

Reinagle died at 5 York Place, Chelsea, London, on 27 Nov. 1838, aged 84. […] A drawing by him, “Fox-huntings the Death,” is in the South Kensington Museum.