Portrait of Master Crewe as Henry VIII

The small boy planting his feet and staring you down is playing Henry VIII. He is John Crewe, about three years old, the son of a Cheshire politician, and his parents had a Tudor costume made for him for a children's fancy-dress party. Reynolds turned the joke into a painting around 1775. He lifted the pose straight from Holbein's famous portrait of the real Henry, all shoulders and swagger and planted legs, then shrank it onto a toddler in miniature finery, small dogs at his feet. Georgian England loved this kind of masquerade, and loved watching children play at being their elders. The writer Horace Walpole admired how Reynolds had swapped the king's colossal haughtiness for what he called the boyish jollity of Master Crewe. The child himself grew up to become a soldier and later a baron.