John Taylor (1738–1814)

In 1765 a Birmingham button maker named John Taylor went into partnership with Sampson Lloyd, an iron merchant, and opened a bank. The firm grew into Lloyds. The man in this portrait is his son, also John Taylor, a partner in the bank for the rest of his life and one of the leading men of the fast-growing industrial town. He sat for Gainsborough around 1778, the year he married his wife Sarah, and her portrait was painted to hang beside this one. The pair has since been split. Hers is in the National Gallery of Art in Washington. In July 1791, 13 years after those sittings, rioters in Birmingham who were attacking the town's religious Dissenters burned down both of Taylor's houses, at Bordesley Park and at Moseley Hall. The portrait stayed in the Taylor family until 1906, when a descendant sold it to art dealers.