Horace Walpole

Reynolds's portrait of Horace Walpole from 1756, in the National Portrait Gallery, depicts the man who was simultaneously a Whig politician, the inventor of the Gothic Revival in architecture, a prolific letter-writer whose correspondence constitutes the fullest documentary record of Georgian cultural life, and the author of The Castle of Otranto (1764) — the novel that founded the Gothic literary genre. Walpole's Strawberry Hill at Twickenham, the fantastical pseudo-medieval house he spent thirty years building and decorating, was one of the defining cultural projects of the Georgian era; his correspondence ran to nearly four thousand letters surviving, addressed to virtually everyone of consequence in British and Continental culture. Reynolds's portrait was painted in the same year as Captain Robert Orme, during the period of his rapid rise to dominance in British portraiture, and Walpole's commission reflects his systematic documentation of the cultural world he inhabited and preserved through his writing and collecting.

Reynolds renders Walpole with characteristic warmth and psychological insight, the knowing expression suggesting the wit for which the sitter was famous. The warm palette and the relatively informal composition create an image of cultivated intelligence appropriate to one of the period's most accomplished writers.