Richard Peers Symons, M.P. (Later Baronet)

The sitter for this portrait, Richard Peers Symons, was a twenty-five-year-old member of Parliament when he was painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds. Reynolds’s image is a masterpiece of British “grand manner” portraiture, influenced by Anthony van Dyck. For most of the eighteenth century, portraiture was considered the lowest form of art, which required no imagination because the artist merely “copied” the sitter’s features. Reynolds set out to enhance the status of portraiture by infusing his portraits with the same noble presence found in narrative works illustrating scenes from classical mythology or the Bible.

In allusion to his erudition, this fashionable young man is represented with two masterworks from classical antiquity, the Farnese Hercules and the Temple of Vesta at Tivoli outside Rome. A dog sits at his side, its pose taken from a well-known portrait by van Dyck. Reynolds’s portrayal of Symons as an inquisitive tourist in Italy, one of the most enlightened adventures a cultivated Englishman might undertake, is all artifice: there is no evidence that Symons ever left England.

A contemporary critic described Reynolds as someone who could make “the exact features of your half-witted acquaintance...[look so] that every muscle in their visage appears to be governed by an enlightened mind.”