Abstract
Joshua Reynolds’s second portrait of Augustus Keppel (1752-53) – which masterfully blended portrait and history painting, as well as heroic and pre-Romantic mood – contributed to the construction of a semantically fluid pictorial identity, a type of dominant masculinity that could assume a multiplicity of roles, not only in the context of Britain’s imperial expansion, but also in an age of social and intellectual transition. This paper examines its influence on naval portraiture, focusing on John Hamilton Mortimer’s group portrait of Captain James Cook, Sir Joseph Banks, Lord Sandwich, Dr Daniel Solander and Dr John Hawkesworth (1771) as well as depictions of Horatio Nelson. Further transformations of the paradigm are analyzed, with an emphasis on its ability to depict new types of national celebrities in its Romantic adaptations, as suggested by portraits of Lord Byron, to conclude with John Everett Millais’s ultimate revisitation of the iconography of the naval portrait in his 1874 North-West Passage.
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