Le colonel Acland et Lord Sydney : les archers

Reynolds showed this at the Royal Academy in 1770, and it must have startled: two young English gentlemen caught in violent motion, drawing longbows in a wooded clearing, dressed as if for some medieval hunt. In 1769 the polite way to paint a gentleman was standing still in his good coat. Instead Reynolds gives us Colonel John Dyke Acland and Lord Sydney straining at their bows, a shot bird already at their feet, the whole picture nearly life-size. Acland would soon carry a real weapon into a real war: within a few years he was fighting for Britain in the American War of Independence, where he was wounded and captured at Saratoga. Tate bought the double portrait in 2005.