The catalogue — portraits, fancy pictures and histories in chronological order, each with a commentary.
714 works by the painter and workshop · 24 copies and works after · 44,380 words of commentary · Part 2 of 21 · 1751–1756
Caricature of Thomas Brudenell, Lord Bruce, and Others (National Gallery of Ireland): one of Reynolds's Roman caricature-groups of 1751, of English Grand Tourists; the young painter's comic invention.
Parody of Raphael's 'School of Athens' (National Gallery of Ireland): Reynolds's Roman caricature (1751) of the English Grand Tourists arranged as the philosophers of Raphael's fresco — a joke that shows how completely he had the great compositions in his eye.
Joseph Wilton (National Portrait Gallery): a portrait of the sculptor, a founder-member of the Royal Academy and a colleague of Reynolds.
An Unknown Lady (National Trust): an unidentified female sitter.
Captain Charles Proby, RN (Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter): a naval portrait of a Devon officer.
Giuseppe Marchi (Royal Academy of Arts): the Roman boy Reynolds brought back from Italy in 1752 and who served as his studio assistant for forty years; a portrait, in exotic turban, of the faithful Marchi.
Henry Vansittart (Fitzwilliam Museum): a portrait of the Governor of Bengal (1760–64), of the East India Company world.
Possibly Elizabeth Hamilton, Mrs Cameron of Glenkindy (National Trust): an uncertainly identified female sitter.
Catherine Moore (Kenwood House): a female portrait in the Iveagh Bequest.
Charles, 9th Lord Cathcart (Manchester Art Gallery): a portrait of the soldier and diplomat, ambassador to Russia; he wears a black patch over a battle-wound, a striking detail.
Isabella Thorold of Syston (Usher Gallery, Lincoln): a portrait of a Lincolnshire gentlewoman.
Jane Hamilton, Lady Cathcart, and her Daughter (Manchester Art Gallery): a maternal group; the pendant to the Lord Cathcart below.
Thomas Middleton Trollope of Casewick (Usher Gallery, Lincoln): a portrait of a Lincolnshire gentleman.
Virgin and Child with the Infant St John (Government Art Collection): a religious subject-picture in the government collection.
Admiral Lord Anson (National Trust): a portrait of the great circumnavigator and reformer of the navy, victor of Cape Finisterre.
Edward Boscawen (National Portrait Gallery): a portrait of the admiral 'Old Dreadnought', victor of Lagos in the Seven Years' War; a great naval sitter.
Field Marshal Jean-Louis Ligonier, later Lord Ligonier (National Army Museum): a portrait of the Huguenot-born commander-in-chief of the British army; a great military sitter (see also the Tate equestrian Ligonier).
Francis Beckford (Tate/National Gallery): a portrait of a member of the wealthy Beckford family of Jamaica sugar.
Harriet Eliot, wife of Richard Eliot (Port Eliot): a portrait of the elder generation of the Eliots, at their Cornish seat.
James Buller of Shillingham and Morval, MP (National Trust): a portrait of a Cornish member of Parliament.
John Hunter, Gentleman-Commoner (Oriel College, Oxford): a portrait of a member of the college (not the surgeon).
Mary Barnardiston (Victoria and Albert Museum): a female portrait of the middle career.
Mrs Chalmers (Detroit Institute of Arts): a female portrait, at Detroit.
Robert Ramsden (Aberdeen): a portrait of a gentleman sitter.
Self-Portrait when Young (Tate/National Gallery): an early self-portrait of the painter as a young man.
Admiral Francis Holburne and his Son (Royal Museums Greenwich): a naval double portrait; the Holburne family gave its name to the Bath museum.
Called Hannah Lightfoot, 'The Fair Quaker' (National Trust): a female portrait traditionally (and improbably) called the young George III's supposed Quaker love; the identification is legend.
Documented work · 3 language editions Q26524198 Wikipedia
Oil on canvas, 240 × 147 cm — National Gallery, London. A full-length of Captain Robert Orme (1725–1790), aide-de-camp to General Braddock, standing beside his horse in a landscape with a dispatch in his hand, in the red coat of the army, having survived Braddock's catastrophic defeat on the Monongahela in 1755. One of the great early full-lengths and a picture Reynolds kept unsold in his studio for years.
Orme is shown at the edge of a battle — the light failing, the horse restless, the officer pausing with his orders — in a composition of movement and mood that raises the military portrait toward history: the American wilderness of Braddock's defeat is behind him, and the picture carries the melancholy of a disaster survived. The pose, the landscape and the dramatic light are the Grand Manner applied to a contemporary soldier, and the red of the coat against the darkening sky is among Reynolds's finest early passages of colour.
The portrait stayed in Reynolds's studio — Orme, who left the army, apparently never took it — and hung there for years as a showpiece, seen by prospective sitters as an advertisement of what the painter could do; it entered the National Gallery in the nineteenth century. Its survival in the studio made it, in effect, part of the painter's own gallery of his best work.
Unsold in the studio; later private collections; National Gallery, London, since 1862.
The dispatch in the hand; the restless horse; the failing light; the red coat. Then the wilderness behind, which is Braddock's defeat.
That Reynolds kept the Orme in his studio for years, unsold, made it one of the pictures by which he advertised himself: prospective sitters, waiting in the painting room, saw what the Grand Manner could do for a soldier, and the picture worked as a showpiece more valuably, perhaps, than any fee. Braddock's defeat on the Monongahela in July 1755 — an ambush in the Pennsylvania woods that killed the general and shattered his army, with the young George Washington among the survivors — was the disaster the picture's mood carries; Orme, wounded there, is shown as its survivor, and the melancholy of the failing light is the melancholy of a catastrophe.
The picture entered the National Gallery in 1862 and is among the best-preserved of the early full-lengths; the red of the coat, painted in stable vermilion, keeps its force where the glazed passages have darkened. It is the National Gallery's demonstration of the young Reynolds's ambition. The composition, with its restless horse, its landscape of retreat and its single standing officer, would be echoed in the later military full-lengths; it is the first of the Grand-Manner soldiers, and the National Gallery hangs it as such, at the head of the room of English portraits.
What distinguishes the Orme from a routine military portrait is its mood — the melancholy of the failing light, the restless horse, the survivor's pause — which lifts it toward history painting without a historical subject; it is a portrait that feels like a narrative, and the narrative is the disaster the sitter had come through. This capacity to give a single figure the weight of an event is the Grand Manner's real contribution to the portrait, and the Orme, early as it is, already commands it.
Charles Fitzroy, 2nd Duke of Grafton (Examination Schools, Oxford): a portrait of the grandson of Charles II, an early sitter of high rank.
Charles Fitzroy, 2nd Duke of Grafton (Ashmolean Museum): another portrait of the Duke of Grafton.
Colonel Edward Cornwallis (Art Gallery of Nova Scotia): a portrait of the founder of Halifax, Nova Scotia, and twin brother of the Archbishop of Canterbury; his conduct toward the Mi'kmaq is now contested, and the portrait's Halifax home carries that history.
Dr John Reynolds (Eton College): a portrait of a clergyman-scholar (no relation established); at Eton.
Francis Hayman (Royal Academy of Arts): a portrait of the painter and illustrator, a founder-member of the Academy and a link to the older English school of Hogarth's generation.
General George Keppel, 3rd Earl of Albemarle (National Trust): the captor of Havana in 1762, brother of Admiral Keppel; a military portrait of the Keppel family that was central to Reynolds's world.
Harry Grey, 4th Earl of Stamford (National Trust): a portrait of a peer of the middle career.
Documented work · 3 language editions Q28047667 Wikipedia
Oil on canvas — National Portrait Gallery, London. A half-length of Horace Walpole (1717–1797), the connoisseur, letter-writer, antiquary of Strawberry Hill and son of the prime minister Sir Robert, seated in a plain coat, the alert, ironic face turned to the viewer. One of the earliest of Reynolds's portraits of the men of letters who would be his friends and his subjects for forty years.
Walpole — the arbiter of Gothic taste, the historian of English painting (his Anecdotes of Painting was the field's founding text), the most inexhaustible correspondent in the language — sat to Reynolds early, and the portrait catches the sharp, amused, valetudinarian intelligence the letters display. It is a plain picture, without the Grand Manner's apparatus: the sitter is a mind, and Reynolds paints the mind. Walpole was not an uncritical admirer of the painter — his taste ran to the Dutch and the exact — but he sat, and the sitting is the record of the early Reynolds among the wits.
By descent from Walpole's circle; the National Portrait Gallery, where it hangs among the eighteenth-century men of letters Reynolds painted.
The ironic mouth; the alert eyes; the plainness. Then the absence of allusion, which is the mark of Reynolds among friends.
Walpole's relation to Reynolds was that of the connoisseur to the practitioner: he admired the painter's success and social rise, was a little cool about the Grand Manner's borrowings (his own taste ran to the exact and the Dutch), and recorded the art world of his time in the letters and the Anecdotes of Painting in England that remain a principal source. That he sat to Reynolds, and more than once, is the record of the painter's centrality — everyone who mattered in the London of the 1760s passed through the painting room, and Walpole, the age's great observer, was painted by the age's great portraitist.
Several versions and studio replicas exist, and the composition was engraved; the National Portrait Gallery's is the standard image of Walpole, reproduced in every edition of the letters. It shows the sitter as the letters show him: sharp, amused, valetudinarian, the most civilised man of his century. The picture is small, plain and exact — no column, no allusion, no sky — and its plainness is the compliment: Walpole is worth painting as a face and a mind, and Reynolds, among his equals, dropped the machinery. It is the type of the intimate portrait the Club produced.
The composition exists in versions and was engraved; the National Portrait Gallery's is the standard image, and it has illustrated the letters and the biographies for two centuries. Walpole, who lived to 1797, saw the whole rise of the English school he chronicled, and his portrait by its founder is a fitting document — the observer observed, by the man whose success proved Walpole's thesis that England could produce a painter fit to rank with the Italians.
Lionel Cranfield Sackville, 1st Duke of Dorset (Government Art Collection): a portrait of the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland; a grand early sitter.
Lucy Sneyd, later Mrs Grove (?) (Holburne Museum): an uncertainly identified female sitter.
Samuel Johnson (National Portrait Gallery): one of the several portraits of Johnson in the national collection.
Works retrieved from Wikidata (creator P170 = Q194402, with image P18); dates from P571 where present, otherwise supplied from the literature; locations from P195/P276; materials P186; dimensions P2048/P2049. Tier labels reflect how many Wikipedia language editions carry an article on the work. Images from Wikimedia Commons; click to enlarge, arrow keys to step. Fetched 2026-08-21.