Portrait du jeune maître Bunbury

Reynolds worked on this in 1780 and 1781, while London was still clearing up after the Gordon Riots and while he was presiding over a Royal Academy newly installed in its grand rooms at Somerset House. The boy is Henry Edward Bunbury, aged three, son of the caricaturist Henry William Bunbury. Reynolds was his godfather, and by the museum's account he held the child's attention through the long sittings by telling him fairy tales. That child became a soldier. On 31 July 1815, as under-secretary of state for war, Major-General Sir Henry Bunbury went aboard the Bellerophon in Plymouth Sound with Admiral Lord Keith and read Napoleon the British government's decision to send him to Saint Helena.