Sir Edward Turner, 2nd Bt of Ambrosden, Oxford (1719–1766)

By 1762 Gainsborough had settled in Bath, the spa town where fashionable England came to take the waters and, while they were there, to sit for their portraits. He had moved from provincial Suffolk three years earlier, and pictures like this one were how he built his name among the wealthy visitors. The sitter is Sir Edward Turner, a Whig member of Parliament who had pulled down his old family manor at Ambrosden in Oxfordshire and put up a grand square house in its place. Gainsborough shows him life-size and full-length, the kind of costly, flattering portrait that announced a man's standing. The next year a printmaker, James Macardell, turned the picture into a mezzotint, so the likeness travelled far beyond the family walls. Turner himself died in 1766, four years after he sat for it.