Politics & Power Quote by Joshua Reynolds

Reynolds is doing something sly here: he flatters culture-makers while quietly admitting how easy it is to poison the well. As an artist and the first president of Britain’s Royal Academy, he lived inside the machinery that turns private preference into public “taste” - academies, salons, patrons, critics. His line reads like a ranking of power, but it’s really a warning about influence disguised as a compliment.

“Forms the taste of a nation” sounds lofty, almost civic. Taste isn’t just about paintings on walls; it’s a social curriculum. It trains people what to admire, what to ignore, what counts as refinement, even what feels “natural.” Reynolds, champion of the Grand Manner and classical standards, is defending a kind of cultural leadership: the artist as legislator of sensibility. The subtext is that taste doesn’t emerge democratically. It’s engineered, and the engineer becomes “great” by setting the terms of prestige.

Then he twists the knife: the second-greatest is the corrupter. Not the barbarian outside the gates, but the insider who knows the system well enough to exploit it. Corruption here isn’t merely vulgarity; it’s miseducation - swapping depth for novelty, craft for flash, standards for hype. Reynolds is acknowledging a grim symmetry: the same tools that elevate a culture can debase it, often faster, often more profitably.

In an 18th-century Britain expanding through commerce and empire, anxieties about mass taste, luxury, and moral decline were everywhere. Reynolds captures that moment with a blunt hierarchy: cultural power is real power, and it comes with the unsettling fact that sabotage can look like fashion.