George Smallridge (1662–1719), Bishop of Bristol

This 1714 portrait of George Smallridge, Bishop of Bristol, depicts a High Church clergyman who was sympathetic to the Jacobite cause and whose appointment to the Bristol see came just months before Queen Anne's death ended the Stuart line. Smallridge's position at the center of the political crisis surrounding the Hanoverian succession gave him a significance beyond his diocese. Kneller dominated British portraiture for nearly half a century as Principal Painter successively to Charles II, James II, William III, and Queen Anne, producing vast output through a studio system where assistants handled costume and background while he concentrated on the face. The portrait is now at Christ Church Picture Gallery, Oxford, the collection associated with the college where Smallridge had significant connections. Kneller's formal conventions for clerical portraiture — dignified bearing, ecclesiastical dress, restrained background — gave his episcopal subjects an air of authority appropriate to their office, and the Bishop of Bristol is depicted with the composure and gravity befitting a churchman who had navigated the most turbulent constitutional crisis of the age.

The episcopal portrait renders Smallridge in clerical vestments with Kneller's practiced efficiency, the bishop's scholarly features and dignified bearing typical of the artist's approach to ecclesiastical portraiture.