The Honorable Henry Fane (1739–1802) with Inigo Jones and Charles Blair

By 1761 Joshua Reynolds was the portrait painter every fashionable Londoner wanted, and he spent the next five years on this canvas, the largest group portrait he ever made. The three young men never actually sat together like this. Reynolds posed each one separately in his studio, then arranged them into an invented afternoon in the country, complete with the props of gentlemanly leisure, a greyhound, wineglasses, a silver ewer. At the centre is Henry Fane, son of an earl. The friend beside him called Inigo Jones is not the famous architect of that name, who had been dead more than a century, but a young contemporary who happened to share it. What Reynolds is really selling here is ease, three well-born friends at rest, their status worn lightly. He would help found the Royal Academy a few years later and become its first president.