William Beckford

Beckford sat for this in February 1782, just back from the Grand Tour and about 21 years old, one of the richest young men in England on a fortune built from Jamaican sugar plantations and the enslaved people who worked them. That same year he wrote his feverish Gothic tale Vathek, about a caliph who damns himself chasing forbidden knowledge. Reynolds gives him the loose Romantic pose and faraway look of a young man who thinks himself a genius, and Beckford agreed. It stayed his favourite picture of himself for the rest of his life. Later he poured the sugar money into Fonthill Abbey and its 90-metre tower, which was built so hastily that it collapsed and had to be pulled down.