El coronel Tarleton

Reynolds showed this at the Royal Academy in 1782, and the timing is the whole story. Banastre Tarleton was 27, the most feared British cavalry commander in the American war, a man the Americans knew as Bloody Ban for the quarter he did or did not give. By the time Reynolds painted him that war was all but lost. The surrender at Yorktown had come the autumn before. Yet nothing here admits defeat. Tarleton stands amid drifting gun-smoke, one leg propped on a cannon, calmly buckling his sword as though about to change horses and charge again. Reynolds also does him a quiet favour. Tarleton had lost two fingers of his right hand to a musket ball in the fighting, and the pose is arranged to keep that hand out of clear view. It was a family commission, ordered by one of his brothers on their mother's behalf. Tarleton came home to Liverpool, went into Parliament, and spent years there defending the slave trade his city lived on.