Conservation work carried out by the National Trust to mark the 300^th anniversary of famed English artist Joshua Reynolds’s birth has revealed a “monstruous figure” in the background of a painting lurking beneath layers of overpaint and varnish. The painting is titled The Death of Cardinal Beaufort (1789) and depicts a scene from Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part 2 (first published in 1594), in which King Henry VI laments the death of the cardinal – his great-uncle – and exclaims, “O! beat away the busy, meddling fiend that lays siege unto this wretch’s soul.”

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