Sir Lionel Walden (1620–1698), Mayor of Huntingdon

This portrait of Sir Lionel Walden, Mayor of Huntingdon, depicts a provincial magistrate who held civic leadership in Oliver Cromwell's hometown — a town whose association with England's most controversial ruler gave its leading families a particular historical resonance. Cromwell's shadow lay over Huntingdon throughout the Restoration period, and portraits of its civic leaders participated in the local memory of England's republican experiment and its royalist reversal. Kneller's provincial portraits of civic leaders like Walden preserve the image of the gentry and merchant class who sustained local government through the constitutional upheavals of the seventeenth century.

The mayoral portrait presents Walden with dignified civic authority, Kneller's standard compositional formula adapted to convey the local importance of a provincial magistrate.