John Hobart, 2º Conde de Buckinghamshire (1723-1793)

By 1784 Thomas Gainsborough had had enough of the Royal Academy. He wanted this full-length hung low, at eye level, where his silvery brushwork could actually be read. The hanging committee refused, so Gainsborough pulled all his pictures and never showed at the Academy again. This was one of them. The man in the crimson and ermine robes of a peer is John Hobart, 2nd Earl of Buckinghamshire, who spent the early 1760s in Saint Petersburg as Britain's ambassador to Catherine the Great, then served as viceroy of Ireland. He commissioned the portrait for a new state room at Blickling, his house in Norfolk, wanting himself and his wife shown in full ceremonial dress. Look at the coat, a blue-green velvet with its light caught in quick, loose strokes rather than carefully drawn.