Mr and Mrs Thomas Coltman

Thomas Coltman and Mary Barlow married in October 1769, and about a year later they sat to their friend Joseph Wright. Coltman had inherited a Lincolnshire estate, Hagnaby Priory, the year before the wedding, and the couple rented Gate Burton Hall, whose stables stand behind them. It is morning and they are about to ride. She sits side-saddle on a grey in a rose-red habit, and he stands beside her in a light summer coat, one arm stretched out, a hand on his hip, while a groom leads his bay horse out. The painter took trouble over the light glinting on the silver trim of that waistcoat, and over the English weather, heavy clouds driven across the sky. A long tradition, since questioned, sees the same two as the young lovers absorbed in each other in Wright's Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump.