2023 is the 300th anniversary of the birth of England’s most famous portrait painter, Sir Joshua Reynolds. At Castle Howard Reynolds holds a very special place having painted a series of family portraits between the 1750s and 1780s. He depicted Frederick, 5th Earl of Carlisle, no less than three times, but he also painted Carlisle’s wife, and two of the couple’s children. Included among these is his celebrated full-length likeness of the 5th Earl, captured in a dramatic and authoritative stance wearing the opulent robes of the Order of the Thistle: not for nothing is this style of picture known as a ‘Swagger Portrait’. Nowadays this portrait belongs to Tate Britain but remains on display at Castle Howard. One charming feature of Reynolds’ portraits of the 5th Earl is how he always included a dog beside the sitter. In 1757 when Howard was just a boy the brown and white dog almost reaches his waist. In the 1769 Thistle portrait Reynolds includes a dog in the bottom right corner of the painting. This was Rover who had accompanied his master on his Grand Tour to Italy a year earlier, although sadly this is a posthumous depiction as Rover did not survive the journey back to England. The 5th Earl knew Reynolds well from his repeated sittings for the artist, but he also admired Reynolds’ taste in paintings and at his studio sale after his death in 1792 he acquired both Reynolds’ portrait of Omai, the South Sea islander who Captain Cook brought back to England in 1774, and Gainsborough’s Girl with Pigs. Thus the influence of Reynolds is still felt strongly in the house today in many ways.