Thomas Papillon

This 1698 portrait of Thomas Papillon depicts a prominent London merchant of Huguenot descent and Whig politician who had fled England during the Tory reaction of the early 1680s before returning after the Glorious Revolution. Papillon's career embodied the connections between Huguenot mercantile wealth, Whig politics, and Protestant religious identity that characterized the commercial class that supported the constitutional settlement of 1688. His portrait by Kneller near the end of his life captures a man who had witnessed the most dramatic constitutional transformations of seventeenth-century England and whose own career had been shaped by its political conflicts.

The merchant-politician is rendered with the confident bearing of a successful businessman, Kneller's direct approach to the sitter's features conveying the practical intelligence that characterized the City of London's commercial elite.