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.

Young kitchen boy playing with a cat, Joseph Bail; oil on canvas; roughly 43 x 28 inches (109 x 71 cm); I don’t know the location of the original, the link is to a gallery site, through which the painting evidently passed at one time, so my assumption would be that it’s in a private collection.

I share with 19th century French painter Joseph-Claude Bail his obviously intense admiration for 18th century French painter Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin.

You can see the similarities in his frequent subject matter of simple kitchen themed genre paintings, his strong contrast between dark and light and his beautiful handling of the textures and visual appearance of objects.

In this painting, the large metal (brass?) pot is strongly reminiscent of Chardins’s handling of similar objects.

Bail was influenced by other painters, of course, and put his own distinctive take on things, but my eye was immediately captured by the Chardin-like elements of this scene.