Sir Charles Saunders (National Maritime Museum): a portrait of the admiral who commanded the fleet at the capture of Quebec (1759).

Queen Charlotte (Brighton Museum): a version of the Queen's portrait.

Queen Charlotte (Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen): the pendant portrait of the Queen.

Rear-Admiral Augustus Keppel (Royal Museums Greenwich): another Greenwich portrait of Keppel.

Sir James Hodges (Tate/National Gallery): a portrait of the town clerk of London.

The Roffey Family (Birmingham Museums): a family group.

The picture

Oil on canvas, 127 × 101.5 cm — The Frick Collection, New York. A portrait of John Burgoyne (1722–1792) — 'Gentleman Johnny', the dashing cavalry general, playwright and MP who would surrender the British army at Saratoga in 1777, the turning-point of the American Revolution — in the uniform of his own regiment of light dragoons, standing with a confident swagger against a sky. One of Reynolds's finest military portraits and the Frick's principal Reynolds.

Gentleman Johnny

Burgoyne is shown at the height of his early fame, before America — the elegant, theatrical soldier, the author of successful comedies, the man of fashion — in a pose of relaxed command, the dragoon's uniform painted with dash. The picture's later meaning is the sitter's: Saratoga made Burgoyne the scapegoat of the American war's first great British defeat, and the Frick's swaggering general is the image of the confidence that Saratoga ended.

History

By descent and the market; Henry Clay Frick; the Frick Collection, where it hangs among the great English portraits Frick assembled — Reynolds, Gainsborough, Romney — the Gilded Age's taste for the Georgian grand manner.

What to look at

The dragoon's uniform; the swagger; the sky; the confident face. Then remember Saratoga, eleven years off.

Gentleman Johnny

Burgoyne was the age's model of the accomplished soldier: a dashing cavalry commander, a fashionable man about town, a successful playwright (The Heiress, The Maid of the Oaks), and an MP. Reynolds painted him in the uniform of the 16th Light Dragoons, the regiment he had raised, in a pose of relaxed swagger against a sky — the confident image of a career that America would break. At Saratoga in October 1777 Burgoyne, cut off after a march south from Canada, surrendered his whole army to the Americans — the defeat that brought France into the war and doomed the British cause — and returned home to disgrace and the defence of his conduct.

History and the Frick

Henry Clay Frick bought the Burgoyne as part of the Gilded Age's acquisition of the English grand manner, and it hangs in the Frick among the Gainsboroughs and Romneys that the American magnates prized as the image of an aristocracy. It is one of Reynolds's finest military portraits, and its swagger is the point: the confidence of the army that Saratoga humbled. The 16th Light Dragoons' uniform, the relaxed pose and the open sky are the image of a career at its zenith; the picture's poignancy, like the Orme's, is retrospective, and the Frick's visitors who know the American war read the swagger against the surrender.

The portrait and the career

Burgoyne raised and led the 16th Light Dragoons, sat in Parliament, wrote successful comedies, and cut a figure in society; Reynolds painted the whole of that confidence into the pose and the sky. Saratoga made him a scapegoat, and the picture's swagger became, in retrospect, its subject — the image of the army and the assurance that the American war humbled. The Frick hangs it among the English grand-manner portraits that the Gilded Age prized as the very definition of an old master.

General John Guise (Christ Church, Oxford): a portrait of the soldier and collector whose pictures went to Christ Church.

John Manners, Marquess of Granby (Ringling Museum, Sarasota): a portrait of the beloved commander of the Seven Years' War.

Lord Rockingham and Edmund Burke (Fitzwilliam Museum): a double portrait of the Whig prime minister and his secretary and ally Burke — the party leadership that was Reynolds's political world; an unfinished and historically important group.

Mrs James Paine and the Misses Paine (Lady Lever Art Gallery): a family group of the architect Paine's wife and daughters.

The picture

Oil on canvas — private collection (Wikidata records no public collection). Reynolds's portrait of the Swiss painter Angelica Kauffman (1741–1807), who had arrived in London in 1766 and become at once a celebrity and, briefly, a founder-member of the Royal Academy — one of only two women among the founders. A portrait of one painter by another, and a document of their friendship.

Two painters

Kauffman, the history painter and decorator whose neoclassical manner conquered London and later Rome, was Reynolds's friend and admirer (she painted his portrait in return, and an allegory of herself hesitating between Music and Painting that echoes his Garrick); the two were the most celebrated painters in London in the late 1760s. That Reynolds should paint her, and she him, is the record of a mutual regard between the President of the Academy and one of its two women founders — a status the Academy would not grant another woman for two centuries.

History

By descent and the market; private collection. The friendship it records links three painters in this series: Reynolds, Kauffman, and (through Kauffman's later Rome years) Vigée Le Brun, who visited her there in 1790.

What to look at

The painter's face by a painter; the manner Reynolds gave a colleague. Then the link to Kauffman's own self-image as an allegory of the arts.

The two founders

Kauffman and Mary Moser were the only two women among the thirty-six founder-members of the Royal Academy in 1768 — and Zoffany's group portrait of the founders famously relegated the two women to portraits on the wall, since they could not attend the life class with the men. Reynolds's portrait of Kauffman is the record of a friendship across that barrier: the President and the woman founder, painted by each other, colleagues in an institution that admitted them and constrained them. Kauffman left London for Rome in 1781, where Vigée Le Brun would visit her in 1790, linking three of this series' painters.

History

By descent and the market; private collection. The picture is a document of the moment when two women stood among the founders of British art's central institution — a moment not repeated on equal terms for two hundred years. Kauffman's own Self-portrait Hesitating between the Arts of Music and Painting (Nostell Priory) echoes Reynolds's Garrick of a few years before — the figure between two allegorical women — and shows how closely the two painters' inventions ran; the friendship was real, and the portraits are its record.

The two founders and the Academy

That the Royal Academy admitted two women among its founders and then, for two centuries, admitted almost none more is the context the portrait carries; Kauffman and Mary Moser were founder-members who could not attend the life class, and Zoffany's group of the founders relegated them to portraits on the wall. Reynolds's portrait of his colleague is a document of the moment of possibility, and of the friendship between the President and the most accomplished woman painter in London before she left for Rome.

Charles Townshend (National Trust): a portrait of the chancellor whose duties on the American colonies helped provoke the Revolution.

The picture

Oil on canvas — Gemäldegalerie, Berlin. A conversation-piece of the surgeon Tysoe Saul Hancock, his wife Philadelphia (the aunt of the novelist Jane Austen — Philadelphia was the sister of Austen's father), their small daughter Betsy, and an Indian ayah, painted after the family's return from Bengal. A rare group portrait in Reynolds's œuvre and a document of the East India Company world — and of Jane Austen's family.

The India connection

The Hancocks had made their fortune in Bengal, where Tysoe was a Company surgeon and a associate of Warren Hastings (Hastings was Betsy's godfather and, rumour said, more); the ayah in the picture is the Indian nurse who came to England with them. The picture is thus a portrait of the Anglo-Indian family of the Company's heyday, with its wealth, its child, and its Indian servant, painted by the painter of the governing class. Its connection to Jane Austen — Philadelphia was the novelist's aunt, and Betsy (Eliza de Feuillide) her cousin and the model, some think, for Mary Crawford — has made it a literary relic.

History

By descent; the German market; the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin, one of the few Reynolds groups outside Britain. The conversation-piece — the informal group in a domestic setting — was a genre Reynolds mostly left to others (Zoffany, Devis), and the Hancock Family is a rare essay in it; its survival in Berlin, and its Austen and Hastings connections, make it one of the most historically dense pictures in the catalogue.

The genre

Reynolds's rare essays in the conversation-piece — the informal, small-scale family group — show him working in a mode he largely ceded to Zoffany and the specialists, and the Hancock Family is the most important of them; its careful arrangement of the four figures, its Indian ayah and its Company wealth make it a portrait of a world as much as a family. Its place in Berlin is an accident of the market, and its Austen connection a gift to literary history.

What to look at

The four figures and their relations; the ayah; the child; the Company wealth. Then the Austen connection, which the picture carries by blood.

The Company family

The Hancocks are the East India Company's world in a single group: the surgeon who went to Bengal to make a fortune, the English wife, the child born in India, the Indian ayah who came home with them, and — off the canvas — Warren Hastings, the future Governor-General, who was Betsy's godfather and the family's patron. The wealth that paid for the picture was Bengal's; the ayah's presence records the human traffic of empire; and the whole is a conversation-piece of the kind Reynolds rarely painted, the informal family group the Dutch and Hogarth had made English.

The Austen relic

Philadelphia Hancock was the sister of the Reverend George Austen, Jane Austen's father; her daughter Eliza, later Comtesse de Feuillide, was the novelist's glamorous cousin and, some think, a model for Mary Crawford in Mansfield Park. The picture is thus a relic of Austen's family as well as of the Company, and its place in Berlin — one of the few Reynolds groups outside Britain — is an accident of the nineteenth-century market.

'Reflection': Girl with a Bunch of Grapes (National Trust): a fancy picture of a girl.

Anthony Chamier (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston): a portrait of the under-secretary of state and member of the Club.

Dr John Armstrong (Art Gallery of South Australia): another portrait of the physician-poet.

George Townshend, 1st Marquess Townshend (private collection): a portrait of the soldier and caricaturist who succeeded Wolfe at Quebec.

John Armstrong, Physician and Poet (Figge Art Museum, Iowa): a portrait of the Scottish physician-poet.

John Parker, 1st Baron Boringdon (National Trust): a portrait of the Devon magnate of Saltram, one of Reynolds's great local patrons.

Piping Shepherd Boy (National Trust): a fancy picture of a shepherd boy.

Elizabeth, Lady Amherst (private collection): the wife of Field Marshal Amherst.

Mrs Barnard (Mead Art Museum, Amherst): a female portrait.

A Girl (possibly Theophila Palmer) (Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter): a portrait of a child, perhaps the painter's great-niece 'Offy' Palmer, a favourite model.

Portrait of a Woman (Metropolitan Museum of Art): an unidentified female sitter.

Possibly Commodore John Harrison (National Trust): an uncertainly identified naval sitter.

Sir John Chichester, 5th Bt (National Trust): a Devon baronet.

Sir Thomas Dyke Acland, 7th Bt (National Trust): a portrait of the Devon magnate.

Sir John Cust, 3rd Bt (National Trust): a portrait of the Speaker of the Commons (see the Corpus Christi and Parliamentary versions).

George Grenville, MP (National Trust): a portrait of the prime minister of the Stamp Act.

Warren Hastings (National Portrait Gallery): a portrait of the first Governor-General of Bengal, whose impeachment (prosecuted by Burke) was the great political trial of the 1780s; a portrait of the maker of British India.

David Garrick (Royal Collection): a portrait of the actor.

George Capel, Viscount Malden, and Lady Elizabeth Capel (Metropolitan Museum of Art): a double portrait of two children of the Earl of Essex.

John Manners, Marquess of Granby (Royal Collection): another portrait of the beloved general.

Montagu Edmund Parker (National Trust): a portrait of a member of the Saltram Parker family.

Recovery from Sickness, an Allegory (Dulwich Picture Gallery): an allegorical subject-picture.

Sir Jeffrey Amherst (Yale Center for British Art): another portrait of the conqueror of Canada.

Sir Jeffrey Amherst (National Gallery of Canada): a portrait of the conqueror of Canada, fittingly in Ottawa.

Sir Thomas Dyke Acland, 7th Bt (National Trust): another portrait of the Devon magnate.

Sir Watkin Williams-Wynn and his Mother (Tate/National Gallery): a portrait of the Welsh magnate as a boy with his mother.