George III reigned through a turbulent period of history, marked by the American War of Independence and the French Revolution. Though his relationship with parliament was occasionally fraught, he cultivated an image of himself as a bluff family man with interests in agriculture and domestic life.

He married Queen Charlotte, a German princess from the province of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, less than a month before his coronation. The couple had fifteen children, of whom thirteen survived into adulthood.

It was not until 1788 that George suffered the first serious bout of the illness that threatened to upset the country’s balance of power. He recovered, but deteriorated again in 1810 – apparently the result of the death of his youngest, favourite, daughter Amelia in November of that year – and his son, George (later George IV) ruled as Prince Regent from 1811 until his father’s death in 1820.

Painted midway through George III’s reign, this portrait by the German artist Johan Joseph Zoffany depicts the King – despite his formal military dress and riband and sash of the Order of the Garter – as a practical, unpretentious figure, painted, with clean Classical lines, sitting informally against a sparse background.

Though not chiefly remembered for his patronage of the arts, George III made several high-profile additions to the modern-day Royal Collection.

In 1761, he purchased the collection of Consul Joseph Smith of Venice, thus acquiring dozens of works by Canaletto, as well as the Royal Collection's only Vermeer. With his wife, Queen Charlotte, George was an active patron of portrait painters, commissioning depictions of himself and his family from artists including Thomas Gainsborough and Jeremiah Meyer, as well as Johan Joseph Zoffany.

However, his primary interest was in books. His collection of 65,000 books and manuscripts became one of the foundational collections of the British Library when, in 1823, it was presented to the nation by his son, George IV.

This painting of a scene from Timon of Athens was one of George III’s first major painting commissions, and it demonstrates an early engagement with Shakespeare on the part of the monarch. It also reveals the king’s taste for Classical compositions, perhaps an unexpected idiom for an illustration of a Shakespeare play. Its subject – the eponymous Timon of Athens throwing money contemptuously at the people who have come to visit him – may have been selected for its similarity to the Classical story of Alexander and Diogenes.

Here, Shakespeare provides an opportunity for a specifically English vision of the improving Classicism George would continue to favour throughout his life.