HRH William Henry, 1st Duke of Gloucester (1743–1805)

HRH William Henry, 1st Duke of Gloucester, painted around 1775 at 231 by 139.5 centimeters in the National Army Museum, occupied one of the most uncomfortable positions in Georgian royal life. His secret marriage to Maria Walpole in 1766 — like his brother Cumberland's marriage to Anne Horton — had provoked George III into passing the Royal Marriages Act of 1772, which required royal family members to obtain the sovereign's consent before marrying. The Duke's marriage to a widow of relatively modest birth represented precisely the kind of romantic over-reaching that the Act was designed to prevent, and his subsequent decades were marked by the social semi-exclusion that George III imposed on both of his brothers' 'unsuitable' families. Gainsborough's enormous full-length portrait treats the Duke with the complete formal dignity of his royal rank, declining to encode any of the social tension that his position created. The National Army Museum's holding contextualizes the portrait within the military dimension of royal service: William Henry had seen service in the German campaigns of the Seven Years War and maintained military connections throughout his life, making the military institutional setting appropriate even for a royal portrait primarily concerned with personal rather than military identity.

The royal commission demands Gainsborough's most polished treatment, with the Duke's military uniform rendered in rich, confident brushwork. The face is handled with the respect appropriate to royalty but retains Gainsborough's characteristic directness — the Duke looks like a real person rather than a mere emblem of rank.