Robert Butcher of Walthamstow

Robert Butcher of Walthamstow from 1765 in the Museo del Prado in Madrid depicts a prosperous London merchant — the kind of non-aristocratic professional sitter whose commissions supplemented Gainsborough's income alongside the more celebrated aristocratic and royal portraits. Butcher's specific business is not documented, but Walthamstow was a prosperous Essex village near London favored by the well-to-do professional class who wanted proximity to the city without actually living in it. The portrait's presence in the Prado, Spain's national museum, documents the dispersal of Georgian British portraits through European collecting in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; the Prado acquired British portraits as part of its representation of European art beyond the Spanish and Italian works that form its core holding.

Gainsborough renders the merchant with the same distinction he brought to aristocratic subjects, using warm color and direct characterization to create a portrait of bourgeois dignity.