Portrait of John Henry, 2nd Marquis of Lansdowne

John Henry Petty, 2nd Marquess of Lansdowne (1765–1809), was a British Whig politician of reformist sympathies, a patron of the arts, and a significant figure in the liberal intellectual culture that connected British and French progressive thought across the revolutionary divide. Fabre's 1795 portrait at the National Gallery of Ireland was made during the period when the Marquess's European travels brought him into contact with the international exile community in Florence, where Fabre was based. The portrait belongs to the category of British aristocratic portraits made in Italy — a rich subgenre connecting the Grand Tour tradition with the continental portraitists who served it. The National Gallery of Ireland's acquisition places the work within the collection of a country that was, in 1795, still three years from the Act of Union and deeply engaged with the reformist ideas that Lansdowne represented.

Fabre employs his standard half-length formula for this aristocratic portrait, with the smooth Davidian handling of the face and the controlled treatment of dress and background that characterised his Florentine practice. The Marquess's evident social standing is communicated through bearing and costume without recourse to heraldic display.