William Eden, First Lord Auckland, M. P.

The title of this small portrait sounds like a contradiction, a lord who also sits in the House of Commons. For a few years William Eden was exactly that. In 1789, while he was serving as a British diplomat abroad, he was made Baron Auckland in the peerage of Ireland, and an Irish title did not bar a man from the Commons at Westminster. He kept his seat for Heytesbury, a small borough in Wiltshire, until 1793, when he was given a British barony and moved up to the Lords.

His career had been made at desks as much as in debates. In 1786 he negotiated a commercial treaty with France that still carries his name, the Eden Treaty, and he went on to serve as ambassador in Madrid and at The Hague. Lawrence, then in his twenties, seats him in a dark coat beside an inkstand with quills, a paper in his hand. The museum dates the canvas only to about 1792 to 1796, and it is small, about 44 centimetres high. In 1876 it was bought at auction in London by the sitter's grandson, Lord Elphinstone, and in 2005 the Boston collectors Thomas H. Lee and Ann Tenenbaum gave it to the Museum of Fine Arts.