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. The Marquess is shown wearing the uniform of a Colonel of the Royal Regiment of Horse Guards; his left arm rests on the flank of his bay horse, held by a groom. The head of a Black groom brilliantly mirrors that of his master, as he gazes in the opposite direction; his dark skin colour in sharp contrast to his white turban. 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 portrait (of 1766-7) is an autograph repetition of one sportingly commissioned by Granby’s foe, the duc de Broglie, painted in 1763-5 and exhibited at the Society of Artists in 1766 (Ringling Museum, Sarasota). It is usually assumed to depict the Battle of Villinghausen of 1761, where Granby, Townshend and Broglie all served, though there may also be a reference to the Battle of Warburg of 1760 during which Granby gained popular notoriety by loosing hat and wig in the eagerness of his charge. His bare head here (an impossible way for a gentleman of the period to present himself when not charging) may also be an allusion to the styles of Classical antiquity.

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 pair of portraits hung in the Crimson Drawing Room at Carlton House and were valued at 1000 guineas each; this Anglo-German pairing, the exceptional 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.