Sir William Codrington (1719–1792), MP for Tewkesbury (1761, 1768, 1774, 1780, 1784 & 1790)

Sir William Codrington, MP for Tewkesbury, was a career parliamentarian who represented the Gloucestershire borough through multiple elections between 1761 and 1790—a sustained parliamentary presence reflecting either genuine local influence or the patron-controlled nature of Georgian constituency politics. Codrington's family interests in the West Indies' sugar economy connected him to the plantation system that sustained so much Georgian wealth. Dance's portrait of 1790 is a late work, when the artist had himself entered Parliament and was painting less regularly. The long careers of both painter and subject—spanning the decades from the Seven Years' War to the French Revolutionary period—give this late portrait a retrospective quality.

The parliamentary portrait employs Dance's mature formula of bust-length format against a neutral ground, the subdued coloring and direct gaze creating an image of provincial political respectability.