Colonel Acland and Lord Sydney: The Archers

Reynolds painted Colonel Acland and Lord Sydney as archers around 1769, during his most concentrated effort to develop the Grand Style he had outlined in his inaugural Discourses delivered to the Royal Academy the previous year. The painting belongs to a distinct category within his portraiture: the double portrait of young aristocrats in classical or martial costume, posed like figures from antique friezes or Renaissance bronzes. Reynolds had been studying the Apollo Belvedere, the Laocoön, and Raphael's tapestry cartoons for two decades since his Italian sojourn, and such works gave him the compositional vocabulary to transform fashionable young men into timeless exemplars of martial virtue. The woodland setting provides the kind of Arcadian backdrop that allies the sitters with the heroic landscape tradition stretching from Giorgione to Poussin. Reynolds's contemporary Gainsborough was at the same moment developing a very different approach — softer, more atmospheric, less reliant on classical precedent — and the contrast between the two greatest British portraitists of the era was already becoming a critical talking point. The Archers, now in Tate, shows Reynolds at his most systematic in applying his theoretical convictions to a practical commission.

Reynolds sets the figures in a dramatic woodland landscape with strong diagonal movement as they draw their bows. The warm Venetian coloring and bold contrasts of light and shadow demonstrate his synthesis of Old Master techniques.