Personal display demanded and received serious attention from the men who governed eighteenthcentury Britain. For a ruling class which depended more on culture than on force as a means of social control, appearances were a matter of inescapably political significance, no less so in art than in life.1 Above and beyond any other considerations, the Englishman who sat for his portrait expected to be shown as a gentleman but while this ideological requirement remained constant, the means of pictorial fulfilment were subject to change. Towards 1750, the pace of that change suddenly accelerated; a coherent system of representation, one which had reigned virtually unchallenged for decades, broke down completely within a few short years. After a long period when English patricians had played an active part in shaping their own pictorial imagery according to a set of well established rules, they now seem to have lost any clear sense of how they wanted to be portrayed. No single painter proved better at exploiting this uncertainty to his own advantage than SirJoshua Reynolds. The mid-century crisis of pictorial confidence stemmed from certain historical pressures which Reynolds was determined to resist; but here I shall argue that those very forces both enabled and informed his celebrated bid to raise portraiture to the level of a serious and ambitious art. I would like to start by offering a few brief comments about that older system of masculine portraiture initially codified by Sir Godfrey Kneller, and only superficially altered by his innumerable followers a tradition which Sir Joshua is often (but inaccurately) credited with having destroyed. As a general rule, the so-called 'Kneller mask' shows its male subject engaged in a theatrical and implicitly public display of goodbreeding; the main purpose of such a representation is to endow the gentleman with what might best be termed the character of 'politeness'. The notion of 'politeness' acquired an unprecedented degree of importance in English high culture during the early eighteenth century, thanks above all to the efforts of certain Whiggish writers, who were anxious to promote a norm of social behaviour capable ofjustifying an emerging commercial society on moral grounds.2 In the essays of Shaftesbury, Addison, Steele, and others, we find a range of different arguments to the effect that a virtuous society can be produced on the basis of true politeness, by sociable interactions between well-bred men in public urban spaces. This ideological prescription for moral worldliness stands in sharp contrast to the cultural primitivism espoused by Tory or Country spokesmen for the much older tradition of civic humanist thought. From their point of view, moreover, true virtue had nothing to do with the skilful management of appearances; on the contrary, the man of civic virtue was defined first and foremost by his independence, which ultimately was founded on the ownership of land. Aside from giving him the freedom necessary to study the workings of society, the possession of a substantial amount of real estate also ensured that the landlord's concerns would be identical to the public interest at large.3 Though such a man was bound to act on behalf of others, he did not make others the reference-point for his own being. His moral character devolved from his status, and as such existed apart from any interactive processes. The defenders of 'politeness', on the other hand, managed to establish a continuum between modern manners and classical morality; as Lawrence Klein has observed, ' reformulated commerce on a high cultural plane and secured virtue to it.'4 Kneller and his followers reworked this ideology into a remarkably resilient pictorial form, one which dominated English male portraiture for half a century or more. But the 'Kneller mask' could keep on functioning smoothly only as long as two fundamental conditions continued to be met. First of all, the forms of polite theatrics had to retain their effectiveness as signs of social distinction. Because of the emphasis it placed on matters of public appearance, 'politeness' made status into something which could virtually be bought and sold on the open market. This openness worked very much to the benefit of essayists in search of subscribers, or of portraitists who were anxious to attract the largest possible number of patrons, and indeed of many tradesmen and professionals who aspired to gentility but there was always the danger that the external conventions of politeness might be appropriated on so large a scale as to destroy their viability altogether. The danger lay in the quickening pace of class emulation and competition: the inevitable byproduct of an increasingly prosperous and urban-