This is a copy of the self-portrait painted by Reynolds in 1780, to hang in the prestigious new headquarters of the Royal Academy of Arts at Somerset House. It hung alongside a companion portrait of the architect William Chambers, its first Treasurer. Reynolds executed the paintings – still in the collection of the Royal Academy – on wooden panels, and it is likely that they were intended to be set permanently into the fittings of the Academy’s Assembly Room.

This version, painted 24 years after the original, is executed on enamel and includes a long inscription on the back listing the sitter’s achievements. In order to produce this miniature version for his royal patron Henry Bone borrowed the original oil painting, from which he made a squared-up drawing (now in the National Portrait Gallery, London), inscribed ‘H.R.H. the Prince of Wales’. By 1819 this miniature was hanging in the Prince Regent’s bedroom at Carlton House.

Reynolds wears a black velvet bonnet and scarlet robes, signifying his Honorary Doctorate of Civil Law from the University of Oxford, with wide sleeves lined with salmon pink silk. Their brilliant colours are better preserved in miniature than in the original oil painting. The sitter’s black velvet cap is direct reference to the style frequently adopted by Rembrandt (see RCIN 404120), which itself was based on fashions of the sixteenth century.

Text adapted from Portrait of the Artist, London, 2016