When this portrait was painted, Pope was at the height of his career and had been a resident of Twickenham for twenty-three years. He had just completed the fourth and final book of his satirical poem, the Dunciad, about which Walpole commented to John Pinkerton in 1785: A . . . though the fourth book has obscurities, I prefer it to the three others. It has descriptions not surpassed by any poet that ever existed; and which surely a writer merely ingenious will never equal.