Portrait of Lord Heathfield

For nearly four years, from 1779 to 1783, Spain and France besieged Gibraltar, and George Augustus Eliott held the Rock through all of it. When Reynolds painted him in 1787, the siege was recent memory, and he gave the old general the great key of the fortress, gripped in both hands and pressed to his body, the thing he had refused to surrender. Behind him the sky is black with smoke, and down on the water his cannon are firing red-hot shot that set the Spanish floating batteries ablaze. Reynolds liked to experiment with his paints, and this canvas began to crack within 20 years, so the surface you see today is already a survivor of its own making.