General John Burgoyne

Reynolds painted General John Burgoyne around 1766, capturing the officer whose later catastrophic defeat at Saratoga in 1777 would become the turning point of the American Revolutionary War. At the time of the portrait, Burgoyne was a glamorous figure: a cavalry officer of evident flair, an aspiring playwright whose comedies were performed in London, and a member of Parliament. Reynolds, who moved in the same fashionable circles, painted him with the confident assurance appropriate to a man at the height of his social success. Burgoyne's subsequent campaign in the American theater was a strategic disaster: his surrender of an entire British army at Saratoga in October 1777 convinced France to enter the war on the American side, transforming a colonial rebellion into a global conflict that Britain could not win. Reynolds's portrait thus gains retrospective historical weight as a record of the officer whose ambition outran his military judgment at the most consequential moment in British imperial history. The painting now hangs in The Frick Collection, having passed through the American art market — an appropriate irony given Burgoyne's role in the creation of the American republic.

Reynolds presents Burgoyne in military dress with his characteristic balance of formality and psychological insight. The warm coloring and fluid brushwork typify Reynolds's middle-period portraits of military men.