Francis Greville, 1st Earl of Warwick

Francis Greville, created 1st Earl of Warwick in 1759, was in the midst of his most visible project when Gainsborough painted him around 1765: the transformation of Warwick Castle into one of England's most admired examples of the picturesque aesthetic. The Earl employed Capability Brown to landscape the castle's grounds in the 1750s, creating the celebrated view from the bridge across the Avon that became a defining image of English picturesque scenery. Gainsborough, who was himself deeply engaged with the aesthetics of the picturesque as a landscape painter, would have found in Greville a patron whose cultural interests aligned with his own. The Cincinnati Art Museum, where this portrait now resides, acquired it as part of its substantial collection of British portraiture. Gainsborough's Bath period treatment of the Earl deploys the compositional vocabulary of grand-manner portraiture — the easy aristocratic bearing, the implied landscape setting — with the lightness and atmospheric freedom that distinguished his approach from Reynolds's more deliberate classicism. The portrait documents both a significant English aristocrat and the cultural world of mid-eighteenth-century taste for landscape improvement.

Gainsborough renders the Earl with the confident, relaxed elegance that distinguished his aristocratic portraits from the stiffer products of lesser painters. The brushwork is fluid and assured, with the dark coat and white cravat creating a strong tonal contrast that focuses attention on the face.