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’. This portrait was certainly comissioned by Queen Charlotte around 1781-3, but Royal Collection inventories confuse it with a very similar one, also by Gainsborough and of the same dimensions (though the figure is seen through a fictive oval window, RCIN 400750). It is probably this other portrait which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1781 and mentioned by Fanny Burney in 1786. This one shows the sitter of the same age but includes the hand almost pointing to the heart - a common way of indicating sincerity. It was engraved in 1783 by John Hall (1739-97), a print later used as the frontispiece for the 1811 edition of Hurd's 'Works', where it is described as from 'the Original Picture in the Possession of her Majesty.'