Colonel Alexander Champion (d.1795)

Gainsborough's Colonel Alexander Champion of around 1767 depicts a British army officer who served in the Seven Years War and later in America, capturing the military bearing and professional confidence of an officer class that constituted an important sector of his portrait commissions. Champion's military service placed him within the British imperial enterprise that was defining national identity during the period of Gainsborough's Bath maturity, and the portrait documents the military culture that provided both subjects and patrons for fashionable painters.

Gainsborough paints the colonial officer with the confident directness of his mature Bath period, the face rendered with warm, observant handling that captures the sitter's personality. The military costume is treated with efficient precision, the overall effect one of masculine authority and physical vigor.