Sir Walter Calverley Blackett, 2nd Bt (1707 – 1777)

Reynolds painted Sir Walter Calverley Blackett around 1761, a large full-length portrait of the Northumberland baronet and Member of Parliament whose family had accumulated wealth through coal mining in the northeast of England. Blackett sat as MP for Newcastle-upon-Tyne for over thirty years, representing the interests of the coal-owning class that was already beginning to drive the Industrial Revolution's early phases. Reynolds's full-length format — nearly two and a half metres tall — was reserved for his grandest commissions, and its deployment for a Northumberland baronet demonstrates both Blackett's wealth and Reynolds's willingness to provide the full theatrical apparatus of Grand Manner portraiture to clients outside the narrow circle of the titled aristocracy. The composition draws on Van Dyck's full-length portraits of seventeenth-century English aristocracy, reinterpreted through Reynolds's Italian experience; the landscape background creates the kind of Arcadian setting that, in Reynolds's compositional rhetoric, associated the sitter with the classical tradition of landowning virtue. Now in a National Trust property, the painting documents the provincial industrial wealth that supported Reynolds's London practice.

The formal portrait presents the baronet with dignified authority. Reynolds's handling creates an image of parliamentary and landed authority.