Général John Burgoyne

Reynolds recorded a sitting with John Burgoyne in his ledger in May 1766, and the uniform here, the light cavalry dress of the Sixteenth Light Dragoons, is the version worn only up to that very month. Burgoyne was then a dashing London figure, known as a gambler, a dandy, a member of Parliament and later a writer of comedies staged in the West End. Reynolds gives him an easy, confident stance, a soldier at the height of fashion. What the portrait cannot show is what came later. In 1777 Burgoyne led a British army down from Canada, was cut off, and surrendered his whole force at Saratoga in New York, a defeat that helped bring France into the American war.