Reynolds was innate around Plympton St Maurice, Devon, on 16 July 1723, and apprenticed inside 1740 to the fashionable portrait painter Thomas Hudson, with whom he remained until 1743. From either 1749 to 1752, he spent over ii years around Italy, mainly around Rome, where he exposed the Old Masters & acquired a taste for the "Grand Style". From either 1753 inside, he lived & worked in London. He became the close friend of Dr Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith, Edmund Burke, Henry Thrale, David Garrick and fellow artist Angelica Kauffmann. He was one of a earliest members of the Royal Society of Arts: he encouraged that society's interest in contemporary art &, by having Gainsborough, established a Royal Academy as a spin-out organisation.

Sustaining his rival Thomas Gainsborough, he was the dominant English limner of the 2nd half of the 18th century. Reynolds painted around sir thomas more of an idealised fashion than his competitor. Reynolds was the brilliant faculty member. His lectures (Discourses) in art, delivered at a Royal Academy between 1769 and 1790, are remembered for their sensitivity & perception. Within one of these lectures he was of the opinion that "invention, strictly speaking, is little to the higher degree a fresh combination of victims images which own been antecedently gathered & deposited in the memory." Around 1789 he lost a sight of his left eye, & in 23 February 1792 he died inside his home in Leicester Fields, London. He was buried in St. Paul's Cathedral.