The commanding figure of eighteenth-century British art and one of the finest portrait-painters of any era, Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-92) produced a huge body of work that today sums up the ideals and aspirations of an entire period. This film presents a wide-ranging assessment of Reynolds's artistic and intellectual achievements. It shows how, as a highly ambitious young man, Reynolds set about creating a portraiture based on the stylistic canons of Classical art and on his own unrivalled professionalism; by the time he was knighted in 1769, Reynolds had proved that English painters could aim for the highest levels of social recognition. As the first President of the newly formed Royal Academy, he also exercised enormous influence on artistic taste and practice. Though his work fell out of favour in the Romantic period, Reynolds emerges in this film as an extraordinarily subtle and intelligent interpreter of the human face, admired today for the decisive individuality he gave his portraits.