Portrait of Charles Coote, 1st Earl of Bellamont (1738-1800), in Robes of the Order of the Bath

Reynolds painted the 1st Earl of Bellamont around 1773, creating one of his most spectacular vehicles for the Grand Manner's visual rhetoric of aristocratic power. The Order of the Bath — reinstated by George I in 1725 as a tool of political patronage — came with robes of deep crimson whose dramatic sweep gave Reynolds exactly the kind of rich drapery he had studied in Van Dyck and in the Venetian painters he encountered on his Italian journey of 1749-52. Coote was an Anglo-Irish peer with a military career in the British Army, and Reynolds gave him the commanding authority of a Roman emperor rather than the informality of a country gentleman. The painting's scale — nearly two and a half metres tall — demanded the viewer look up to the sitter, replicating the social deference the Earl expected in life. Reynolds was at this point the most sought-after portraitist in Britain and the recently installed first president of the Royal Academy (founded 1768), and commissions like Bellamont served to demonstrate his theoretical convictions about portrait painting's capacity for grandeur. Now in the National Gallery of Ireland, the work stands as one of the finest examples of Reynolds's theatrical approach to aristocratic portraiture.

The brilliant scarlet robes dominate the composition, painted with rich impasto and masterful handling of satin and ermine textures. Reynolds employs a classical column and drapery as props, with dramatic lighting emphasizing the sitter's commanding presence.