Murray is shown here in his mid-thirties wearing the Highland Dress of the 3rd Regiment of Foot Guards. No payment for this portrait is recorded and it was not collected from Reynolds's studio. Lord Dunmore later went to America and became Governor of New York and then Governor of Virginia. He was unpopular with the colonists and was constantly engaged in disputes. By the time the War of Independence was underway, he had been driven away.
Sir Joshua Reynolds (English, 1723 - 1792)
Reynolds was born in Plympton, Devon, the son of a headmaster. He was apprenticed to the London portrait painter, Thomas Hudson, in 1740. In 1749 he went to Italy, spending two years in Rome. On his return, in 1753, he set up a studio in London. Reynolds developed a portrait style which attempted to marry the sitter's need for a fashionable likeness with the complexity of traditional religious and historical painting. His compositions are usually interesting but his technique was often unsound, and many of his pictures have deteriorated badly. He was a founding member of the Royal Academy of Arts and its first president, a position of huge influence which Reynolds used to set the future course of British art.
