Philip Reinagle was so accomplished a copyist of the Dutch masters that his reproductions of cattle-pieces and landscapes after Paulus Potter, Jacob van Ruisdael, Meindert Hobbema and Adriaen van de Velde, whose own work is also held by John Mitchell Fine Paintings, have on occasion been passed off as originals, a reputation that says as much about Reinagle's technical facility as about the market for Dutch pictures in Georgian England. Born in Edinburgh in 1749, the son of a Hungarian musician, he was sent to London at fourteen to be apprenticed to the Scottish portrait painter Allan Ramsay, then Painter in Ordinary to George III, and spent some two decades in Ramsay's studio, reportedly producing more than ninety copies of Ramsay's coronation portraits of George III and Queen Charlotte for distribution across the royal household and beyond.
Reinagle entered the Royal Academy Schools in 1769 and exhibited portraits almost exclusively until 1785, when what he found the monotonous business of royal portrait replication gave way to a decisive and successful change of direction into animal painting. He became particularly celebrated for sporting dogs, spaniels above all, alongside birds and studies of dead game, and from 1787 exhibited increasingly as a landscape painter too. Elected an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1787, he did not become a full Academician until 1812, presenting An Eagle and a Vulture Disputing with a Hyena as his diploma work. Alongside his exhibited paintings, Reinagle contributed drawings to two major botanical publishing projects by Robert John Thornton, the New Illustration of the Sexual System of Linnaeus and the celebrated Temple of Flora, and supplied the dog studies, engraved by John Scott, for William Taplin's Sportsman's Cabinet of 1803. Despite genuine critical regard from his peers, Reinagle struggled financially throughout his career, supporting a family of eleven children, four daughters and both his sons among them going on to become painters in their own right, and required a Royal Academy grant in 1798 to make ends meet. His eldest son, Ramsay Richard Reinagle, also represented in John Mitchell Fine Paintings' collection, followed directly in his father's stylistic footsteps as a portrait, landscape and animal painter.
The forest floor study by Reinagle held by John Mitchell Fine Paintings, depicting a lizard, frog and snail, reflects the close naturalistic observation that also underpinned his sporting and botanical work, and situates him, alongside his son, within a genuine father-and-son painting dynasty represented across the gallery's British holdings.