Portrait de Henry Edward Stuart, cardinal duc d'Yorck

Henry Benedict Stuart, Cardinal Duke of York (1725–1807), was the younger brother of Bonnie Prince Charlie and the last male member of the Stuart royal family — a prince, a Jacobite pretender, and ultimately a cardinal who outlived the cause he represented. Mengs's 1756 portrait, now in the Musée Fabre in Montpellier, captures him at age thirty-one, four years after Bonnie Prince Charlie's defeat at Culloden had ended the last serious Jacobite attempt on the British throne. As a cardinal living in Rome, Henry Benedict occupied a prominent position in both ecclesiastical and Jacobite exile culture, and a portrait by Mengs — the leading painter of the Roman intellectual world — was entirely appropriate to his cultural ambitions. The Musée Fabre's possession of this portrait reflects the dispersal of Jacobite court material through European collections after the Stuart cause's final collapse.

Cardinal portraiture required the characteristic scarlet of the office alongside the specific Stuart physiognomy that would have been recognisable to contemporaries familiar with the dynasty's iconography. Mengs's approach likely balanced ecclesiastical formality with a sensitivity to the particular personal circumstances of a prince in permanent exile.