William Johnstone-Pulteney, poi 5º baronetto

Gainsborough painted this around 1772, in his last couple of years working in Bath before he moved to London for good. The spa town was where Britain's wealthy came to take the waters, and it had made him the most fashionable portraitist in the country. His sitter had risen fast. William Johnstone was a struggling Scottish lawyer until a good marriage and a sudden inheritance in 1767 turned him into Bath's richest resident, at which point he adopted his wife's grander name, Pulteney. Much of that new fortune ran back to family ventures overseas, including slave-worked sugar plantations in the West Indies. Gainsborough kept the portrait plain, wary of the flattery he privately despised, and gave the full-length figure a quiet, almost understated bearing rather than the swagger the money could have bought.