Group Portrait of the Dilettante Society

Reynolds's Group Portrait of the Dilettante Society from around 1778 documents his relationship with the most influential organization of arts patronage in Georgian Britain. The Society of Dilettanti, founded around 1734, comprised gentlemen who had made the Grand Tour and shared an interest in classical archaeology and Mediterranean culture; its members included some of the most significant art collectors and cultural entrepreneurs of the era. Reynolds was proposed as a member in 1766, though his election was delayed by procedural complications; the Society ultimately commissioned two group portraits from him in 1777-78, of which this is one. The paintings hang at Brooks's Club in London, the Whig establishment's social heart, creating a visual record of the overlap between political patronage and aesthetic connoisseurship in the Georgian elite. Reynolds's commission gave him an opportunity to demonstrate his command of the conversation piece format at grand scale while celebrating the cultural ambitions of a class whose collections and whose patronage of the arts he considered essential to the development of British culture.

The group portrait arranges multiple figures in a convivial setting. Reynolds's handling captures the social dynamics of the connoisseur club.