William (Thomas) Beckford

Reynolds painted William Beckford around 1782, capturing the man who embodied Georgian England's most extravagant cultural ambitions and its darkest scandals. Beckford was at this date perhaps the richest commoner in England, heir to a Jamaican plantation fortune that would fund the construction of Fonthill Abbey — the staggering Gothic tower in Wiltshire that became a monument to Romantic excess and architectural fantasy. Reynolds's three-quarter-length portrait presents a young man of evident intelligence and self-possession, giving no hint of the catastrophe to come: in 1784, rumours of a relationship with the sixteen-year-old William Courtenay destroyed Beckford's reputation and forced him into decades of Continental exile. His novel Vathek (written in French in 1782, the same year as the portrait) and his incomparable art collection — which eventually included works by Raphael, Bellini, and Bruegel — made him a figure simultaneously admired and condemned. For Reynolds, Beckford represented the kind of brilliant, cultivated patron whose company he actively sought; the portrait appears in the National Portrait Gallery as a record of one of the most troubled geniuses of British Romanticism's threshold generation.

Reynolds uses a dark, subdued palette typical of his male portraits, with careful attention to the sitter's intelligent expression. The three-quarter format and neutral background focus attention on Beckford's face and character.