Sir Thomas Dyke Acland, 3rd/7th Baronet Acland of Columb-John MP (1722-1785)

Reynolds painted Sir Thomas Dyke Acland around 1768, depicting the Devon baronet whose family seat at Killerton would become one of the National Trust's most important properties. The Aclands were among the leading Whig families in the southwest of England. Now in a National Trust property, the portrait documents the Devon political dynasty that would continue to play a significant role in national life well into the nineteenth century. Sir Joshua Reynolds, the first President of the Royal Academy of Arts and the most intellectually ambitious portrait painter of eighteenth-century Britain, combined the social function of the portrait with the elevated aspirations of history painting through his concept of the "Grand Style." His Discourses, delivered to the Royal Academy over fifteen years, codified the academic doctrine of painting in Britain, arguing for the supremacy of the ideal over the particular and the elevated over the mundane. His own portraits attempted to embody this doctrine: sitters placed in settings, poses, and costumes that associated them with the great tradition of painting from Raphael and Titian through Rubens and Rembrandt. Whether or not the attempt always succeeded, it gave British portraiture an intellectual ambition it had previously lacked.

The portrait exemplifies Reynolds's mature Grand Manner approach, with the sitter posed with authoritative ease against a landscape backdrop suggesting his landed estates. The rich, warm tonality and confident brushwork demonstrate his command of the English portrait tradition he essentially created.