Meanwhile the Society were accustomed to meet at the Thatched House Tavern, the large room of which was hung with portraits of the Dilettanti. Sir Joshua Reynolds, who was a member, painted for the Society three capital pictures:--1. A group in the manner of Paul Veronese, containing the portraits of the Duke of Leeds, Lord Dundas, Constantine Lord Mulgrave, Lord Seaforth, the Hon. Charles Greville, Charles Crowle, Esq., and Sir Joseph Banks. 2. A group in the manner of the same master, containing portraits of Sir William Hamilton, Sir Watkin W. Wynne, Richard Thomson, Esq., Sir John Taylor, Payne Galway, Esq., John Smythe, Esq., and Spencer S. Stanhope, Esq. 3. Head of Sir Joshua, dressed in a loose robe, and in his own hair. The earlier portraits are by Hudson, Reynolds's master.
Some of these portraits are in the costume familiar to us through Hogarth; others are in Turkish or Roman dresses. There is a mixture of the convivial in all these pictures: many are using wine-glasses of no small size: Lord Sandwich, for instance, in a Turkish costume, casts a most unorthodox glance upon a brimming goblet in his left hand, while his right holds a flask of great capacity. Sir Bouchier Wray is seated in the cabin of a ship, mixing punch, and eagerly embracing the bowl, of which a lurch of the sea would seem about to deprive him: the inscription is _Dulce est desipere in loco_. Here is a curious old portrait of the Earl of Holdernesse, in a red cap, as a gondolier, with the Rialto and Venice in the background; there is Charles Sackville, Duke of Dorset, as a Roman senator, dated 1738; Lord Galloway, in the dress of a cardinal; and a very singular likeness of one of the earliest of the Dilettanti, Lord Le Despencer, as a monk at his devotions: his Lordship is clasping a brimming goblet for his rosary, and his eyes are not very piously fixed on a statue of the Venus de' Medici. It must be conceded that some of these pictures remind one of the Medmenham orgies, with which some of the Dilettanti were not unfamiliar. The ceiling of the large room was painted to represent sky, and crossed by gold cords interlacing each other, and from their knots were hung three large glass chandeliers.