Portrait of King George III

Joshua Reynolds was one of Britain’s leading portraitists in the 1700s, and the Royal Academy’s first President. He began his career studying artists of the past in Rome, where he caught a bad cold which left him partially deaf so he often used an ear trumpet. Reynolds courted aristocracy, celebrity and royalty to establish himself as a prominent, sought-after cultural figure. He popularised established European theories on art through a series of fifteen widely disseminated lectures published as his Discourses on Art. In these, he argued that painters should look to classical and Renaissance art as their model, and should seek to idealise nature rather than copy it. He positioned paintings of epic historic moments as the highest genre of art – with still-lifes, landscapes and animal painting ranking at the bottom – but the high demand for his portraits meant that he rarely painted such grand scenes himself. A few years after he made this portrait, Reynolds was given the official role of court painter to King George III.