Charles Churchill

The painter shows Churchill (c. 1720–1812), a Member of Parliament, as a gentleman at leisure in the countryside, riding crop in hand. Reynolds adapted continental models old and new to create his own grand style, thus meeting his clients’ demands for a dignified and artful portraiture that matched their own self-image. To achieve this, he famously experimented with materials and technique: Churchill’s ghostly pallor results from the use of an unstable red pigment, since vanished; his tan clothes are likely “underpainting,” a dull preparatory layer that would later have been modified with coloured glazes, now lost. Frame: carved wood, gilded. Britain, first-half 18th century, after a French model