Horace Walpole

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.