It was important for Reynolds that the intellectual work of the artist should be understood to be of far greatest significance than the manual work. The great painter was a thinker, he maintained, rather than a technician. The fourth of Reynolds's Discourses, for instance, begins:
The value and rank of every art is in proportion to the mental labour employed in it, or the mental pleasure produced by it. As this principle is observed or neglected, our profession becomes either a liberal art, or a mechanical trade. In the hands of one man it makes the highest pretensions as it is addressed to the noblest faculties: in those of another it is reduced to a mere matter or ornament; the painter has but the humble province of furnishing our apartments with elegance. ( Reynolds, Discourses p. 57)
Intrinsic to this position is Reynolds's promotion of the general over the specific.