Thomas Gainsborough
In the1920s this painting showed up on an art market as a portrait of "General Blyth." No such person ever existed - it's possible that one of the dealers who had it for sale changed the name to that of General Thomas Bligh (1685–1775), a career army officer from Rathmore, County Meath. The sitter is not Bligh, however, and no other identification had been proposed until 2010, when Hugh Belsey identified him as John Hobart (1723–1793), 2nd Earl of Buckinghamshire.
The earl, of Blicking, in Norfolk, inherited at thirty-three and married, in 1761, a woman whose large fortune contributed to the renovation of his great Jacobean family house. The year after his first wife’s death in 1768, he married Caroline, sister of Thomas Conolly (1738–1803), who was among the wealthiest men in Ireland. Buckinghamshire served as British envoy to St. Petersburg and, briefly, as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. By his second wife, he had three sons who died in infancy.