The portrait, for which there were many sittings, attracted public notice and a contemporary account claimed that it established Reynolds as the 'greatest painter that England had seen since Van Dyck'. It was important for Reynolds because he was hoping to attract distinguished patrons and advance his own career by portraying a rising star, who also wished to advance himself. Keppel, as befits one of the most highly regarded of England's young naval commanders at the time, strides on a beach in a pose stylistically adopted by eighteenth-century portrait painters to elevate the status of their sitters. Reynolds has variously been thought to have been inspired by the classical statue the Apollo Belvedere (which he would have seen in Rome), or by a seventeenth-century statue of Apollo related to this by the French sculptor Pierre Legros. The background of tempestuous sea, stormy shore and wreckage in the waves, anticipates the Romantic movement. The dramatic lighting and striding figure indicate a Venetian influence. That the background was a case of 'second thoughts' is proved by the fact that the cliff on the left is painted over a more conventional earlier design of a classical column on a raised base.