Portrait of Frederick Howard, 5th Earl of Carlisle (1748–1825)

In 1768 the young Frederick Howard, still on his travels abroad, was invested at Turin with the Order of the Thistle, one of Scotland's oldest honours. He came home to sit for Reynolds the next spring, and Reynolds gave him the full swagger treatment: standing tall in the heavy robes of the order, a portrait built to be seen from clear across a room. It went to Castle Howard, the vast house his family had built, and it has hung there ever since, delivered in 1775 and never really moved. The Earl grew up to be a politician and, briefly, one of the men London sent to try to talk the American colonies out of revolution.