Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg

The man in this portrait was one of the great showmen of 1770s London. Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg, born in Strasbourg, had come to England in 1770 and taken charge of the scenery at the Drury Lane theatre for the actor David Garrick, transforming what a stage set could do with light and movement. A few years after Gainsborough painted him he would open the Eidophusikon, a small theatre of moving painted scenes with shifting light and sound effects, an ancestor of the panorama and eventually the cinema. Gainsborough, who admired that spectacle, shows him confident and at ease, arms folded over a sheaf of papers. It was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1778 and now hangs at Dulwich Picture Gallery.