Thomas Pennant

When Gainsborough painted this in 1776, his sitter was one of the most widely read travellers in Britain. Thomas Pennant, a country gentleman from Downing in north Wales, had made his name describing long journeys through Scotland and Wales and cataloguing British birds and animals, at a time when much of the country had never been set down in print. Samuel Johnson, not a man who praised lightly, called him the best traveller he had ever read. Gainsborough had moved to London two years earlier and was in demand for just this kind of portrait. He worked fast, in thin feathery strokes, and leaves Pennant looking less like a posed dignitary than a sharp, slightly restless man between one journey and the next. Two years on he would publish his Tours in Wales, the book that fixed how outsiders pictured his country. The museum in Cardiff bought the portrait in 1953.