Portrait of William Baker, M.P. (1743-1824), of Bayfordbury Manor, Hertford, three-quarter-length, in a brown suit, his right hand holding a volume of Milton, by a column in a landscape

The sitter was a founding member of the Whig Club. He was Member of Parliament for Plympton Erle (1768-1774), Aldborough (1777-1780), Hertford (1780-1784), and finally Hertfordshire intermittently from 1790 to 1807. In 1804 he inherited the series of portraits by Kneller of the members of the famous Kit-Kat Club, which included Addison, Congreve, Steele and Vanbrugh. Baker's maternal grandfather Jacob Tonson, had been secretary to the club, and had originally commissioned the works to be in a room at Barn Elms where the club gathered, but it had proved too small for the standard full-portrait size, and so they were painted to be 36 x 28 inches, engendering the fashion for pictures of 'Kit-Kat' dimensions. On inheriting the set, by 1812, William Baker built a special room to house them at his house, Bayfordbury Manor, Hertfordshire, where they remained until bought for the National Portrait Gallery, London, in 1945.