Captain John Gell  1785

In 1785 the British naval officer John Gell (1738–1806) had just completed his duty on the seventy-gun Monarca, which he had commanded in a series of battles against the French. For this portrait, Stuart used as a model Sir Joshua Reynolds’s heroic "Commodore Augustus Keppel" (1752; National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, UK). In homage to Reynolds, Stuart employed a combinat...