Welbore Ellis (1713–1802), Baron Mendip

Welbore Ellis, Baron Mendip, painted around 1769 and now at Christ Church Oxford, was among the politicians most responsible for the policies that alienated the American colonies in the run-up to the Revolutionary War. As Secretary at War under Grenville and later as Secretary of State for the American Department under Lord North, Ellis supported the series of taxation measures that provoked colonial resistance culminating in independence. Christ Church, Oxford's great aristocratic college, educated generations of British statesmen, and Ellis's portrait in its collection places him within the institutional memory of the governing class that shaped — and arguably destroyed — the first British Empire. Gainsborough's portrait at 124.5 by 99.1 centimeters treats Ellis with the formal dignity appropriate to a senior minister, entirely without the satirical edge that Hogarth might have brought to a political portrait. This straightforward treatment was Gainsborough's consistent approach to sitters whose political records were complicated: he documented authority and social position rather than making moral judgments through pictorial means, leaving posterity to supply the critical perspective his portraits quietly declined to offer.

Gainsborough paints the politician with the composed authority of a man accustomed to public life. The handling is typical of his mature Bath period, with the dark political costume providing a sober frame for the warmly modelled face and its expression of worldly experience.