This portrait was probably commissioned by Queen Charlotte. It was praised as ‘finely executed’ when it was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1781, at the same time as Gainsborough’s full-length portraits of the King and Queen. Richard Hurd (1720-1808) was a scholar, a critic praised by Gibbon, and an author whose publications included many sermons, pamphlets and editions of Horace’s work. His Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762) stand at the start of the Romantic movement in England. Hurd was made Archdeacon of Gloucester in 1767 and Bishop of Lichfield and Coventry in 1774. He was a favourite with the royal family and an ally of the King on the episcopal bench. In 1776 he was appointed Preceptor, responsible for the education of the King’s two eldest sons (the Prince of Wales and Duke of York). Following his appointment as Bishop of Worcester and Clerk of the Closet in 1781, the royal family visited him at Hartlebury Castle and at the Bishop’s Palace, Worcester, in August 1788. Hurd turned down the King’s offer of the Archbishopric of Canterbury in 1790 as ‘a charge not suited to his temper and talents’. In the event of a French invasion after war broke out again in 1803, it was to the Bishop’s Palace that the King planned to send his family.

In the 1780s Hurd assisted in drawing up the programme for Benjamin West’s series of paintings illustrating the history of revealed religion for the King’s new private chapel at Windsor, a project never realised. According to Horace Walpole, Hurd was ‘a gentle, plausible man affecting a singular decorum that endeared him highly to devout old ladies’. In Gainsborough’s portrait the ground is left visible in the surround and in the loosely painted white rochet but the confident gaze is from a well-defined face.

Royal Collection inventories confuse this portrait with a very similar one, also by Gainsborough and of the same dimensions, but it is likely that this is the one mentioned by Fanny Burney in 1786: ‘He is, and justly, most high in [the Queen’s] favour. In town she has his picture in her bedroom, and its companion is Mrs Delany. How worthily paired! What honour to herself, such honour to them! There is no other portrait there but of royal houses.’