Frederick North, 2nd Earl of Guilford KG, FSA (1732-1792)

Reynolds painted Frederick North, 2nd Earl of Guilford, around 1763, nearly a decade before North became Prime Minister — a tenure that would cover the entire period of the American Revolution and end with the humiliating British defeat at Yorktown. North served as Prime Minister from 1770 to 1782, presiding over the disastrous prosecution of the war that lost Britain its American colonies; he later acknowledged that his prosecution of the war had been mistaken, but continued in office largely because George III insisted on it. Reynolds's 1763 portrait shows the younger North, before these trials, as a compact, intelligent-looking man — a sitter whose significance history would abundantly supply. Reynolds was himself no ideologue, painting Whigs and Tories with equal facility, and his social connections with Johnson, Burke, and Gibbon gave him access to political figures across the spectrum. The National Trust's holding of the canvas documents the formal political establishment that Reynolds served as its visual chronicler throughout the central decades of British eighteenth-century history.

The formal portrait presents the earl with dignified bearing. Reynolds's Grand Manner treatment elevates the political subject through compositional authority.