A three-quarter-length portrait of the naval officer John Hamilton (1715–1755) wearing a tunic, a braided belt, a fur coat and a busby with a thin moustache on his upper lip. This flamboyant costume is modelled on hussar dress, a fashionable masquerade costume in the 1740s which was designed to emulate the military dress of Hungarian hussars. The hussars were elite Eastern European horsemen, who fought alongside British troops in support of the Empress Maria Theresa during the War of the Austrian Succession (1739–48). In Britain, they became a subject of public fascination, in particular for their exotic-looking uniform. Hamilton leans on a walking stick with his right hand and places his left hand on his hip. In the lower right-hand corne of the image, there is an image of a dismasted two-decker in difficulty on a stormy sea. This detail may allude to the wreck of the ‘Princess Louisa’, 40 guns, on 29 December 1736, when the ship was escorting George II on his return from a visit to Hanover. As a lieutenant in the Princess Louisa, Hamilton distinguished himself during the wreck: declaring that he would have “the same Fate with the common Sailors, and claim no Precedency”, he remained on board until the entire crew had escaped to safety. Recalling this earlier act of heroism, the shipwreck in Reynolds’s portrait characterises Hamilton as an intrepid adventurer. Lettered beneath the image with the title, ‘Captain John Hamilton, R.N.’, and the production and publication details: ‘Sir Joshua Reynolds / R. Josey / London. Henry Graves & Co. 6 Pall Mall 1876.’ This portrait was engraved by Richard Josey after Joshua Reynolds’s oil painting of 1746 (private collection). The print was published by Henry Graves and Company in 1876. Reynolds painted Hamilton’s portrait in Plymouth, where the artist was based in the early years of his career after undertaking an apprenticeship with the portrait painter Thomas Hudson in London in 1741–3. According to Reynolds’s friend Edmond Malone, the painting of Hamilton, which is remarkably bold, confident and ambition in its conception and execution, was “the first of [the artist’s] performances which brought him into any considerable notice”. Hamilton was the second son of the Earl of Albemarle and a successful naval officer, who commanded the ‘Augusta’, 60 guns, in 1743–8. He met Reynolds through the Cornish landowner Richard Eliot, who was one of the young artist’s most important patrons in Plymouth. Hamilton was a friend of Eliot’s family and even appeared in Reynolds’s group portrait of the Eliot family in 1745, now at Port Eliot. The relationship that developed between Hamilton and Reynolds appears to have been relatively close: Hamilton gave Reynolds a copy of Roger de Piles’s ‘Cours de Peinture par Principes’ (1708), an influential artistic treatise of the day, and sat to the artist for another two portraits before he drowned at Portsmouth in 1755. Reynolds went on to become one of the leading portrait painters of the eighteenth century and, in 1768, he was appointed the first President of the newly founded Royal Academy. (Updated May 2019.)