Captain Thomas Mathews

For a few months in 1772 the man in this portrait was among the most talked-about people in Bath, and for bad reasons. Thomas Mathews, married since 1763, had been pursuing Elizabeth Linley, a teenage singer the town adored. In March 1772 she fled to France with the young Richard Brinsley Sheridan, later the author of The School for Scandal. Mathews put a notice in the Bath paper calling Sheridan a liar and a treacherous scoundrel, and the two men fought twice. In London that May, Sheridan had the better of it and forced an apology. In the second duel, on Kingsdown above Bath in July, Mathews won and Sheridan was badly wounded. Gainsborough knew the Linley family well. In a letter that year he took Sheridan's side and called Mathews a scoundrel, and the Museum of Fine Arts suggests that is why this portrait was left unfinished. Mathews lived on for almost 50 years and died in 1820.