ホレス・ウォルポール

Joshua Reynolds had not long been back from studying in Italy when he painted this in 1756, still building the London practice that would make him the most sought-after portraitist in England. His sitter, Horace Walpole, was a member of Parliament and the son of Britain's first prime minister, but that is not really why we remember him. A few years after this, Walpole would publish The Castle of Otranto, the book usually called the first Gothic novel, and turn his villa at Strawberry Hill, west of London, into a mock-medieval fantasy that started a fashion. Reynolds shows him young and composed, resting beside an antique marble eagle Walpole had brought home from Rome. Walpole later gave the picture away to a colleague at the Exchequer.