Daniel Boardman

Ralph Earl

National Gallery of Art

A pale-skinned man wearing a white waistcoat, navy-blue coat with tails, knee-length britches, and white stockings stands in front of a deep landscape in this vertical portrait painting. The man nearly fills the right half of the composition. He stands with one ankle crossed in front of the other and his body angled to our left. He looks out at us with brown eyes under wide, dark gray brows. He has a round face with a wide jaw, a straight nose, and his thin, pale pink lips are closed. His gray hair is brushed back from his forehead and sweeps down over his ears. A white cravat is tied in a bow around his neck under a cream-white waistcoat, which is trimmed with pale peach and has two rows of peach buttons down the front. The jacket has gold-colored buttons, and translucent, ruffled cuffs flare out at the wrists. A fob hangs from his parchment-white pants, which are fastened with an oval-shaped, diamond-encrusted buckle on the outside of the knee facing us. His stockings are pearl white, and his black shoes have square silver buckles. He holds a black hat in his left hand, to our right, and his other hand rests on the end of a waist-high wooden walking stick, which angles out to our left where the brass end is braced against the ground. A brown form behind him and to the right could be a column, edge of a building, or a tree trunk. A thick trunk angles out on the far side of his head, and a smaller tree grows up the left side of the composition. Grassy fields reach back to a winding river and a town with a church spire, manor house, and other buildings tucked among hills. Lavender-gray clouds press in to either side of a sunset sky lit pale pink at the center. The artist signed and dated the painting in the lower left corner, "R. Earl Pinxt 1789.”