The lawyer Joshua Grigby III (1731-1798)

The pose is a landed gentleman's, a man leaning easily against a rock in open country with nowhere in particular to be. When Gainsborough painted it, somewhere around 1760 to 1765, Joshua Grigby had none of that yet. He was a working barrister out of a Suffolk family of lawyers, established at Gray's Inn in London in 1756, and he would not inherit the family estate at Drinkstone Park until 1771. The public career came later still. He sat in Parliament from 1784 to 1790 and spoke against the slave trade. The portrait stayed in Britain long enough to be shown at the Royal Academy in 1872, and it reached Berlin only in 1980, bought for the Gemäldegalerie by the private association that buys pictures for the museum.