Francis Basset, 1st Baron de Dunstanville

Francis Basset was 20 when he sat for this in Rome, over the winter of 1777 and the spring of 1778. Batoni signed the stone plinth the young man leans on, in Latin, painted at Rome in 1778, and put the dome of Saint Peter's in the distance behind the trees.

Then the portrait went to sea. Early in 1779 the ship carrying it home, the Westmorland, was taken by two French warships and brought into Málaga, where her cargo was condemned as a prize of war. The crates of Grand Tour purchases became known in Spain as the presa inglesa, the English prize, and were bought for Carlos III. That is how a portrait of a Cornish landowner has been in Madrid ever since.

Basset spent that same summer on the other side of the war. In August 1779, with a French and Spanish landing expected on the Cornish coast, he marched about 600 tin miners nearly 70 miles to work on the defences at Plymouth, and was made a baronet for it in November.