Diana disarming Cupid: Elizabeth Dashwood, Duchess of Manchester (1741-1832) and her Son George Montagu, Viscount...

Sir Joshua Reynolds PRA (Plympton 1723 - London 1792). Oil painting on canvas, Diana disarming Cupid: Elizabeth Dashwood, Duchess of Manchester (1741-1832) and her Son George Montagu, Viscount Manderville (1763 – 1772), by Sir Joshua Reynolds PRA (Plympton 1723 - London 1792). Reynolds's first entry to the first Royal Academy exhibition in 1769, and thus something of a manifesto of his art. In borrowing the motif and the pose from Francesco Albani's Disarming of Cupid (Paris, Louvre), Reynolds considered he was exploiting the Old Masters creatively to raise the status of portraiture, but he was attacked as a plagiarist by Nathaniel Hone in his painting, The Conjuror (1775). Horace Walpole's dismissive comment 'bade attitude' is a fair judgement on a curiously laboured composition. The sitters in this much ruined portrait have no connection with Wimpole; Mrs Bambridge probably bought it and the Queen Charlotte (WIM/P/13) purely to furnish two of the panels in this room. (From the Kimbolton Castle collection - Ellis K. Waterhouse 'Reynolds' plate 125) Wimpole, Cambridgeshire (Accredited Museum)