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Mr. Pulteney, as he was commonly known in Bath, appears to have sat for this portrait a number of times; in an undated letter, probably of 1772, Gainsborough wrote to inform his client of his progress on the work:

I think we could still finish a little higher, to great
advantage, if it would not be intruding too much upon
your good nature to bestow one more little sitting of
about half an hour…I am fired with the thoughts of
Mrs. Pulteney is giving me leave to send you to the Royal
Exhibition, and of making a good Portrait of you.1

It is possible, as this letter suggests, that Gainsborough exhibited the picture at the 1772 Royal Academy as "Portrait of a Gentleman."
Although deeply rooted within the tradition of English full-length portraiture-Gainsborouth looked to van Dyck for inspiration-this portrait is clearly of its own age. Gainsborough was acutely aware of the potential excesses he considered inherent in contemporary conventions of the full-length, and he exclaimed to his friend the actor David Garrick:

There is certainly a false taste & an impudent style
prevailing which if Vandyke was living would put him
out of countenance; and I think even his work would
appear so opposed to such a glare. Nature is modest and
the artist should be so in his addresses to Her.2

Gainsborough paints Pulteney with none of the "false taste &…impudent style" that he feared in portraits of its kind, and it is, above all, the sitter's dignity and modesty that he captures. As Malcolm Cormack has pointed out, the painting conveys visually the qualities described in Pulteney's obituary of 1805:

Under a forbidding exterior and still more neglected or
almost threadbare dress which he usually wore, he
manifested a strong sense, a masculine understanding,
and very independent as well as very upright principles of action.3

Born in 1729 in Westerhall, Dumfries (Scotland), William Johnstone was the third son of Sir James Johnstone, 4th Baronet; he became 5th Baronet in 1794. As a young man he moved in Scottish intellectual circles, and among his friends were Adam Smith and David Hume. Without an inheritance to speak of, he pursued a career as an advocate at the Scottish bar. In 1760 he married Frances Pulteney, heiress to the Pulteney estates through her relationship to the Earls of Bath; in 1767, when she succeeded to her lands and wealth, he added the Pulteney name to his own. Though living mainly in Bath from this time onwards, he sat as Member of Parliament for Cromartyshire from 1768 to 1774 and for Shrewsbury from 1775 to 1805.

As a man of "upright principles of action," Pulteney ardently supported the American colonies in their bid against taxation without representation; nonetheless, he steadfastly promoted continuing union with the colonies and eventually met with Benjamin Franklin in Paris in 1778 in a futile attempt to find a peaceful solution to the conflict. His interest in the colonies' fate stemmed from his ownership of over a million acres of land between Lake Ontario and the Pennsylvania border.

Vocal and active not only in politics, Pulteney financed projects of artistic and scientific merit in Bath and beyond. In 1790, for instance, he helped to fund the first Chair of Agriculture at Edinburgh University. Closer to home, he continuously, though not always successfully, funded major projects of urban development. At the same time this portrait was being painted, in fact, he was deeply involved with the planning and building of Pulteney Bridge, one of Bath's most significant landmarks and a monument to the Neoclassical vision of its architects, Robert and James Adam.

Julia Marciari-Alexander 1 Woodall, 127.
2 Ibid., 63
3 Cormack 1991, 110.

Julia Marciari-Alexander, This other Eden, paintings from the Yale Center for British Art, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT, 1998, p. 100, no. 36, ND1314.3 Y36 1998 (YCBA)