This lecture looks at the life and work of Sir Godfrey Kneller (1646-1723), the leading portraitist of Stuart and early Georgian England. His ambition was only exceeded by his productivity: there are stories of as many as fourteen sitters in a single day and that at his death, three hundred years ago, there were 500 unfinished portraits in his studio. Such reliance on assistants produced many rather indifferent works and in 1815 James Northcote dismissed the majority of Kneller’s portraits as ‘hasty slobbers…scarcely fit to be seen’. But the sheer volume of work should not taint our opinion of a painter who produced portraits of seven successive British monarchs, arguably the definitive portraits of Isaac Newton and Christopher Wren, the Kit Kat portraits and the Hampton Court Beauties. Kneller’s achievement as a painter was actually quite remarkable.