Portrait of a Man (said to be Lord Anson)

The title keeps its distance twice. The museum gives the painting to a follower of Reynolds, an unnamed artist working in his manner, and the man is only said to be Lord Anson. If the tradition is right, the sitter is George Anson, the admiral who led a squadron round the world between 1740 and 1744. Most of his men died on that voyage, many of them of scurvy, but in 1743, off the Philippines, his one remaining ship took the Spanish galleon sailing from Acapulco loaded with silver, and the treasure was paraded through London in wagons. He went on to run the navy as First Lord of the Admiralty. Reynolds painted him from life in 1754 and 1755, and that likeness was copied more than once. The record of this canvas begins much later, in July 1910, when a London dealer sold it on to the firm of Arthur Tooth and Sons.