Sir William Pulteney (formerly Johnstone), fifth baronet

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Artist: Thomas Gainsborough (British, 1727–1788)
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 93 1/2 x 59 inches (237.5 x 149.9 cm)
Museum: Yale Center for British Art
Rights: CC0 — no rights reserved

In 1759, Thomas Gainsborough had established himself in the fashionable spa town of Bath, where he became the leading portrait painter and renowned for capturing a good likeness. This full-length portrait was among the last he made in Bath before he moved to London in 1774. A good marriage and an unexpected inheritance in 1767 had transformed the sitter, William Johnstone, from a struggling Scottish lawyer into Bath’s richest resident, and one of the wealthiest commoners in Britain.

Adopting his wife’s name of Pulteney, he increased his landed wealth through careful investment in the Johnstone family’s commercial interests in India and North America, including slave-based sugar plantations in the West Indies. Gainsborough charged around 100 guineas for this portrait of Pulteney in an idyllic park-like setting, about the same price Pulteney would have paid for a skilled male slave on his Caribbean plantations.

Text: Yale Center for British Art.