Portrait of Richard Milles

Richard Milles of Nackington, in Kent, sat for this in Rome around 1759, and by 1761 he was Member of Parliament for Canterbury, a seat he kept until 1780. Batoni gives him a red cape lined with fur over a silver silk waistcoat, and a hand planted on his hip, a pose found in Titian and Van Dyck before him. With the other hand the young man points to a map inscribed Grisons, a Swiss canton he probably crossed on his way to Italy. Beside it stands a bust of the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, soldier and Stoic philosopher. It copies a real sculpture now in the Capitoline Museums, and it appears only this once in the painter's work. Milles also ordered a miniature of himself on ivory, now in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.