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 at the end of the artist’s life and acquired many examples of his earlier work.

This is one of a pair of portraits in the Royal Collection (OM 1022, 405894 and OM 1027, 405893) depicting British and German hero-comrades of the Seven Year’s War, the Marquess of Granby (1721-70) and Count of Schaumburg-Lippe (1724-77). They were commissioned by George Townshend, 1st Marquess Townshend (1724-1807), who had served under both men, and given to George IV by his widow in 1810. This portrait was painted between 1764 and 1767 and depicts the sitter resting his arm on a staff held before him; standing on a mound beside a cannon while below, on the right, a groom, wearing a turban, holds the reins of his bay charger.

The Black groom looks up at his master, his dark skin colour in sharp contrast to his white turban. He wears a silver collar, indicating that he is an enslaved person. The servant is unlikely to represent an identifiable individual. Instead, the inclusion of Black figures as servants, attendants, or enslaved people in portraits of European sitters in eighteenth-century art was a common visual trope. These figures, often shown in acts of service, were deployed as a visual status symbol.

This pair of portraits hung in the Crimson Drawing Room at Carlton House and were valued at 1000 guineas each; this Anglo-German pairing, the exception scale and value of the works, Reynolds’s brilliant stage-managing of a battle-portrait, these are all things which must have had an influence on George IV and Sir Thomas Lawrence in planning the Waterloo Chamber.