Portrait of Sir Luke Schaub, of Basel

In 1720 King George I knighted a Basel notary's son named Luke Schaub, and within a year made him Britain's ambassador to France. So the man sitting for this portrait in Paris in 1721 was at the peak of a career that had carried him from a law desk in Switzerland through the embassies of Vienna and Hanover to Versailles. To record the moment he went to the busiest portraitist in France, the same painter the French king sat for. Schaub had an eye for pictures himself. When he died in London in 1758 he left a large collection of paintings that was sold at auction. This portrait travelled the other way, back to the city where he was born, and it hangs there in Basel today.