Lady Cockburn and Her Three Eldest Sons

Reynolds signed this in gold and dated it 1773, when he was riding high as the first president of the new Royal Academy. He borrowed the pose from old paintings of Charity, one of the Christian virtues, so a fashionable London mother doubles as an emblem of maternal love, her three small boys clambering over her. The bright macaw overhead was a late addition, painted from life. It was probably Reynolds's own bird, tame enough to perch on the wrist of his friend Doctor Johnson, the famous man of letters. The middle child, George, born in 1772, would grow up to be the admiral who burned Washington in 1814 and carried Napoleon into exile the following year.