Robert Butcher of Walthamstow

Gainsborough spent the 1760s in Bath, the spa town where fashionable England came to drink the waters and sat for portraits while it was there. This one belongs to those years, painted around 1765. The canvas is small, 75 by 62 centimetres, and the sitter is set inside a painted oval, the standard shape for a half-length. Sobriety is the whole of it: a wig, a plain coat, a face, and none of the columns or draperies that portraitists used to lift a man's standing. The title names him by where he lived, Walthamstow, then a village in Essex outside London where City families kept country houses. The Prado bought the picture in 1955 from the London dealer Marshall Spink.