Captain the Honourable Augustus Keppel, 1725-86

In 1749 Augustus Keppel was a young captain taking the Centurion out to Algiers, and he gave a 26-year-old painter called Joshua Reynolds a passage south. That voyage put Reynolds in Italy for three years. He was back in London in 1752, and he painted Keppel life-size on a shore, striding forward in a pose lifted from the Apollo Belvedere, the antique statue he had studied in Rome. The sea behind is up and there is wreckage in the surf, usually read as the loss of Keppel's ship the Maidstone off the Brittany coast in 1747, which a court martial cleared him of. Under the cliff on the left an earlier idea is still there: Reynolds first painted a classical column on a base, then changed his mind. He kept the portrait in his studio for years, where anyone thinking of commissioning him could see it.