This portrait hung in Kirtlington Park, Oxfordshire, the family seat of the Dashwood family for almost 200 years. The dining room was widely regarded as one of the most beautiful Rococo rooms in England. The estate was sold in 1909 and the dining room was eventually acquired and reassembled at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, making up the largest room in the MET''s wing dedicated to European Rooms and Art.The gentleman in this portrait is wearing a white double-breasted waistcoat and a green frock coat. The book probably alludes to the sitter’s profession. The fashion for men wearing their ‘country clothes’ in town originated by nobleman at a time when court life did not require their constant attendance and they could live in the country and have only a house in town. It was a sense of rebuttal to the previous decades when there were strict instructions how to stand, how to walk, how to raise the glass to a lady, and how to bow. It was a counter-reaction against such detailed...