This work’s “whodunit” past speaks to the broad reach of the fluid portrait style popular in London in the late eighteenth century, which spread throughout the British Empire. The MFA bought this painting in 1904 as a John Singleton Copley. By the 1920s, scholars were claiming it for Gilbert Stuart. In 1958, it was attributed to American expatriate Mather Brown, only to be re-catalogued in the 1980s as a work by an unidentified British painter. The sitter, Peter Rainier (1741-1808), had an illustrious career in the Royal Navy, serving in the Pacific, the West and East Indies, and in India.

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