From Out of the Shadows: Sir Joshua Reynolds' Captain Robert Orme

This article offers a detailed interpretation of Reynolds' 1756 portrait of Captain Robert Orme, and in doing so seeks to recover the workings of military portraiture during the period of the Seven Years War (17561763). It ties Reynolds' picture to the particular historical circumstances of a catastrophic defeat for British forces in North America, and to contemporary debates concerning the identity and status of the military officer. Orme's portrait is also read in relation to the formal and ideological dynamics of chiaroscuro, which in this case functioned to promote Reynolds' subject as both a heroic, swashbuckling soldier and as an introspective, sensitive figure attuned to the melancholy narratives of a massacre. Another portrait painted by Reynolds in this period a picture of Cornet Nehemiah Winter that eerily duplicates Orme's features confirms the extent to which the artist's works adapted to the storylines of defeat as well as victory, and reveals the forms of conflicted masculinity that thereby emerged in the sphere of visual representation. Finally, the article traces the shifting identity of Orme within the contrasting spaces of the artist's showroom and the annual London exhibitions, and at two very different moments in the city's and the nation's wartime history