Isaac Henrique Sequeira

Gainsborough had just left Bath for London when he painted this, around 1775, and the sitter was his own doctor. Isaac Henrique Sequeira was born in Lisbon in 1738 into a Portuguese Jewish family who could not practise their religion at home. He went to Bordeaux, studied medicine at Leiden, and settled in London, where he built a fashionable practice and served as physician to the Portuguese embassy. Gainsborough painted him seated at a table with a book, thoughtful and a little melancholy, the kind of character study he admired in Van Dyck. British pictures are rare in the Prado, which grew out of the Spanish royal collections, and this one arrived in a single step: the New York dealer Bertram Newhouse gave it to the museum in 1953.