When George III was asked by Lord Eglinton to sit for the most fashionable portrait painter of the day, Joshua Reynolds, he replied: ‘Mr Ramsay is my painter, my Lord.’ Reynolds tried to gain royal notice with two speculative ventures – a portrait of George III as Prince of Wales (OM 1011, 401034) and an oil sketch for a depiction of his marriage to Queen Charlotte (OM 1012, 404353) – both of which remained on his hands. Reynolds was knighted by George III, made first president of the Royal Academy and Principal Painter to the King upon Ramsay’s death in 1784, but never asked to paint anything. That the Royal Collection has a fine group of Reynolds is entirely thanks to George IV, who commissioned portraits like this one at the end of the artist’s life and acquired many examples of his earlier work.

This portrait, in which the Duke of Orléans wears the Hussar’s uniform and the ribbon of the Saint-Esprit, was commissioned by George IV when Prince of Wales and begun when the sitter was in London in 1785; it was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1786. Reynolds painted him in 1785, describing him as the ‘most elegant man’ and observing that ‘many men appeared graceful when in motion, but that the Duke of Orleans was the only man who appeared so when standing still’. Reynolds's portrait of George IV (Arundel Castle) was intended as a reciprocal gift for the Duke of Chartres, though never delivered. Unfortunately this portrait was severely damaged in the Carlton House fire of 8 June 1824; various attempts to restore it have achieved little. Its original appearance can be gauged from a small early nineteenth-century copy (RCIN 407607). 

The sitter appears standing in Hussar's uniform with the ribbon of the Saint-Esprit, holding his plumed hat in his left hand; behind him is a groom holding a charger and in the distance is a castle on a hill.