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Gainsborough painted this late in both their lives, around 1785. By then Jeffrey Amherst was a field marshal and a baron, the man who had led British forces to take Canada from France in 1760, and his name still marks towns and a college in New England. It also carries a darker record. During a Native American uprising in 1763, in written exchanges with a subordinate, Amherst approved the idea of spreading smallpox among the besieging tribes by means of infected blankets, one of the earliest documented proposals of deliberate biological warfare on the continent. Gainsborough, painting two decades later, shows none of that, only an elderly commander in a feigned oval, given the soft handling and silvered tones the artist brought to everyone who sat for him.