Portrait of George Pitt, First Baron Rivers (1769): Art, History and Details

Portrait of George Pitt, First Baron Rivers (1769) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Thomas Gainsborough (British, 1727–1788).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Although George Pitt reputedly led a life of debauchery and was a cruel husband, Thomas Gainsborough’s portrait endows him with an aura of dignity and refinement. This work was painted between Pitt’s appointments as ambassador to Turin, Italy, and Madrid, Spain, but he is very much the English gentleman at home on his country estate. Gainsborough balances the deep scarlet and green facing of Pitt’s military uniform with the cool, woodland landscape painted with wide, liquid brushstrokes of mauves, grays, and silvers.

Object facts

• Title: Portrait of George Pitt, First Baron Rivers
• Date: 1769
• Creator attribution: Thomas Gainsborough (British, 1727–1788)
• Culture: England, 18th century
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on canvas
• Dimensions: Framed: 261 x 181 x 9 cm (102 3/4 x 71 1/4 x 3 9/16 in.); Unframed: 234.3 x 154.3 cm (92 1/4 x 60 3/4 in.)
• Collection: P - British before 1800
• Department: European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1971.2

A detail from the museum

Gainsborough was famous for his portraits, but he especially loved painting landscapes.

Collection credit

Gift of the John Huntington Art and Polytechnic Trust

Further reading listed by the museum

• Belsey, Hugh. Thomas Gainsborough: The Portraits, Fancy Pictures and Copies After Old Masters. New Haven, CT. Yale University Press, 2019. p. 712-714.
• Brock-Arnold, George M. Gainsborough. London, United Kingdom: S. Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, 1889.
• Monkhouse, Cosmo. "Thomas Gainsborough." In Dictionary of National Biography. Leslie Stephen, ed., 361-367. New York: Macmillan, 1885.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.