James Maitland, 7e comte de Lauderdale

Reynolds painted this Scottish earl in 1759, early in the career that would make him the most sought-after portraitist in Britain and the first president of the Royal Academy. Lord Lauderdale was 41, an army man, and he sits here in his crimson coronation robes, the ermine on the cape marking his rank as an earl, leaning with practised ease on the base of a twisted column. That column is a quiet piece of theatre. It hints at the grand tour of Italy that a cultivated gentleman was expected to have made, though Lauderdale in fact never went. He bought the finished picture from Reynolds two years later for 80 pounds, and it stayed with his family for more than two centuries.