Two Officers and a Groom in a Landscape,

1777

This engaging but enigmatic picture probably does not commemorate the meeting of a British officer with a Spanish envoy in Gibraltar, as once believed, but it clearly represents a specific event more or less contemporary to the painting’s execution. As such, it recalls the great innovation of Benjamin West, an American artist long established in London, who in 1770 began rendering important current events in the manner of history paintings (a genre usually concerned with the distant past) and who depicted his subjects in modern, as opposed to classical, dress. Although the precise nature of the more modest meeting shown here remains unclear, it does appear to have a diplomatic aspect, as the officers’ exchange of hats—a traditional gesture of goodwill—would suggest.