While in the past Gainsborough's copy was thought probably to have been painted in 1785, when he visited Holkham Hall with a view to executing a companion equestrian portrait of the Prince of Wales for Thomas, 1st Earl of Leicester (a commission that was never carried out), we are grateful to Hugh Belsey for pointing out that, stylistically, the painting appears to date from the 1760s. This portrait of Albert de Ligne, Prince of Arenberg and Barbonçon is based on Sir Anthony van Dyck's celebrated equestrian portrait of the sitter in the collection of the Earl of Leicester, Holkham Hall, Norfolk (fig. Reynolds, Discourse on Art, XIV, London, 1788, ed. What he thus learned, he applied to the originals of nature, which he saw with his own eyes and imitated, not in the manner of those masters, but in his own' (J.
Reynolds recalled of Gainsborough in the Discourse dedicated to his great rival, delivered to the Academy on 10 December 1788, that 'To satisfy himself as well as others, how well he knew the mechanism and artifice which they employed to bring out that tone of colour which we so much admire in their works, he occasionally made copies from Rubens, Teniers, and Vandyck, which it would be no disgrace to the most accurate connoisseur to mistake, at the first sight, for the works of those masters.
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