William Shirley

Thomas Hudson was the dominant English portrait painter of the 1740s and 1750s, before Reynolds displaced him, and his portrait of William Shirley — colonial governor of Massachusetts during the French and Indian War — documents an important figure in mid-eighteenth-century Anglo-American history. Shirley served as governor from 1741 to 1756 and was a significant military and political architect of British expansion in North America. Hudson's formal portrait records Shirley in the conventions of the period: the three-quarter length pose with one hand extended, a distant landscape or draped column in the background. The picture at the National Portrait Gallery is both a document of a colonial administrator at the height of his influence and an example of Hudson's capable if ultimately routine approach to likeness.

Hudson composes with the reliable formulas he employed consistently: a slightly turned pose, warm flesh modeled against a dark ground, and the costume and setting rendered by assistants in his busy studio. The face, likely Hudson's own work, is given more individual attention than the broadly painted drapery and background.