Dr Ralph Schomberg

Dr Ralph Schomberg from 1770 in the National Gallery depicts a prominent physician in Bath during Gainsborough's most productive years in that city, when the fashionable medical establishment served both as his patients and his portrait subjects. The full-length scale (233 × 153.5 cm) was unusual for a non-aristocratic professional sitter, and the commission suggests that Schomberg's prominence within Bath's medical and social world was sufficient to justify it. Gainsborough's late Bath portraiture had developed a standard of technical freedom and psychological directness that made him the preferred painter of those who valued characterful individuality over the more formal, allegorizing approach of Reynolds. The National Gallery holds the work alongside major examples of British eighteenth-century portraiture where the Schomberg can be compared directly with Reynolds's more classically oriented treatment of professional male sitters.

The portrait demonstrates Gainsborough's Bath period refinement, with careful rendering of the sitter's professional attire and the warm, direct lighting that reveals character.