Portrait of Charles John Crowle

Charles John Crowle was in his early twenties when he posed for this in Rome, around 1761 to 1762. Batoni dressed him in blue velvet worked with silver and stood him at a gilded table with a letter in his hand. Around him lie a quill and inkstand, books, an armillary sphere, the ringed model of the heavens, and a sheet of drawing spilling over the edge. Behind him are small versions of two famous ancient statues then in Rome, the massive Farnese Hercules and the reclining woman known as Ariadne. A dog jumps up at his knee.

For Crowle the antiquities were not just scenery. Back in England he joined the Society of Dilettanti in 1764, a London club of men who had travelled in Italy and paid for the study of ancient art, and he was its secretary from 1774 to 1778. He also sat in Parliament for Richmond in Yorkshire. His lasting passion turned out to be paper. From the early 1790s he took Thomas Pennant's history of London and filled it out with more than 3,000 prints and drawings, until it ran to 14 large volumes bound in red leather. He left them to the British Museum when he died in 1811.

The portrait stayed with his heirs, last at Dallam Tower in Westmorland, until it was sold at Christie's in London in 1981. The Society of Friends of the Louvre bought it at that sale and gave it to the museum.