8th Lord Arundell of Wardour

Reynolds painted the 8th Lord Arundell of Wardour around 1764, depicting a member of one of the small number of English Catholic families that had survived the penal laws with their estates and social position intact. The Arundells of Wardour Castle in Wiltshire were recusant Catholics whose faith had insulated them from the Protestant mainstream of English political life while preserving an aristocratic culture that maintained Continental connections unavailable to most English gentlemen. Reynolds himself had no particular religious commitment — his Discourses suggest a thoroughly secular aesthetic philosophy — but he was sufficiently cosmopolitan to paint Catholics, Dissenters, and free-thinkers alongside the Anglican establishment that formed his primary market. The Rococo era designation places the portrait within Reynolds's transitional period, after his Italian journey had transformed his technical approach but before the systematic development of the Grand Style that the founding of the Royal Academy in 1768 would accelerate. The painting is now in the Dayton Art Institute, one of many Reynolds works that enriched American collections through the transatlantic art trade of the late nineteenth century.

The formal portrait presents the peer with aristocratic authority. Reynolds's Grand Manner handling elevates the sitter through composition and palette.