Alex Kidson, the author of George Romney, A Complete Catalogue of his Paintings (Yale 2015) dates this painting on grounds of style to 1767 or 1768.In a letter (Private Correspondence 2026) he writes that Romney spent a good deal of his time in those years up in Kendal, where the majority of his sitters were provincial businessmen and their families.He notes that the costume of this sitter, practical and un-adorned, would seem to underline the idea that he was a man from that tranche of society.

But Kidson also deciphered the label on the back of this picture as reading ‘Leigh’ and further mooted a possible connection to Jared Leigh, who of course with his family, was the subject of Romney’s great group portrait of 1768.