Portrait of George III, Benjamin West, oil on canvas, roughly 100 x 72 in. (255 x 183 cm), in the collection of the Royal Collection Trust.
American born painter Benjamin West, successful in the US, and specifically here his home state of Pennsylvania, moved to England after a European tour at the age of 25, where he became a founder of the Royal Academy of Arts and a favored portraitist to the king.
In this life-sized portrait, the ruling monarch of Great Britain is dressed in his soldierly uniform and presented as a strong, forceful military commander, with outlines of troop deployment in his hands, and soldiers, generals, encampments and warships behind him, but the regalia of his absolute power as a king are close at hand.
King George is shown preparing for his latest crisis, an impending invasion by the combined French and Spanish fleets. This was only a few years after we (with the critical help of the French, who Ben Franklin convinced to come to our aid) had kicked his royal butt out of our newly founded constitutional republic.