Edward, Duke of York (1739-1767), set off on a Grand Tour of Italy in the summer of 1763, at the age of 24. After first visiting Genoa, Florence and Rome, he travelled to Venice in May 1764. He spent three weeks there, hosted in lavish style by several Venetian noblemen, in the company of members of his Household and other English gentry.

It is surrounded by these men that the Duke of York was portrayed by Richard Brompton, in the original painting (404433 also in the Royal Collection) and in the several copies made in the subsequent years, of which this is one. The Duke sits in the centre, wearing the ribbon and star of the Order of the Garter; on the left stands the Duke’s Master of the Horse, Sir William Boothby (1721-87) with his arm around the shoulders of the Duke’s Groom of the Bedchamber, Colonel Henry St. John (c. 1738-1818); on the right, Whig politician and Dilettanti Society member Henry Temple, 2nd Viscount Palmerston (1739-1802) leans his arm on the Duke’s seat, with Resident at Venice John Murray (d. 1775), the Earl of Upper Ossory, John Fitzpatrick (1745-1818) and the grandson of the 1st Duke of St Albans, Topham Beauclerk (1739-80) also standing beside him. Brompton may first have been commissioned to produce the work by Murray, and though the original group portrait is set in Venice it is likely that Brompton did not start painting it until the party travelled on to Padua.

In the painting and its copies, Brompton followed a growing tradition of group portraiture commissioned by Grand Tourists. An Antique vase, upon which a relief of Leda and the Swan can be discerned, sits on a high plinth in the centre of the painting, above the Duke of York. Thus, both the Duke and the cultural education he was experiencing are made prominent. Not only is his status made clear by his attire, his positioning and the gestures of his companions, but the Duke’s name is actually inscribed on one of the greyhounds’ collars, on the left-hand side.

The Duke of York also sat for several individual portraits to commemorate his Grand Tour, commissioning both Grand-Tour portraitist par excellence Pompeo Batoni and his English follower Nathaniel Dance-Holland.