Portrait of John Murray, 4th Earl of Dunmore

Reynolds's portrait of John Murray, 4th Earl of Dunmore from 1765, in the National Galleries of Scotland, depicts a Scottish nobleman whose career would take him from Georgian Edinburgh to the colonial frontier of North America, where he would serve as the last royal governor of Virginia and issue the famous Dunmore Proclamation of 1775 offering freedom to enslaved people who escaped to fight for the British Crown. The portrait was painted eight years before Murray left for America, at a moment when he was a rising political figure in the Hanoverian establishment and before the American Revolution had made him a historically significant rather than merely socially distinguished figure. Reynolds's portrait shows Murray with the composed confidence appropriate to a nobleman at the beginning of a promising career, the landscape background and the military bearing suggesting the active engagement with public life that would make his American years so historically consequential.

Reynolds's grand-manner technique presents the Earl with the commanding presence expected of aristocratic portraiture. The warm, rich palette and the carefully arranged costume create an image of natural authority within the conventions of eighteenth-century British portraiture.