Lord Duffus was a Scottish aristocrat who supported the Act of Union in 1707. However, during the 1715 Jacobite Rising he joined the rebels who wanted to restore the exiled Stuart dynasty. The Rising failed and Duffus’s estates were forfeited. He fled to the continent, but was captured and imprisoned in the Tower of London. Released in 1717, he later served in the Russian Imperial Navy where he rose to the rank of admiral. This portrait was painted before Lord Duffus joined the Jacobite cause. The painting is an early and complete depiction of Highland dress. Lord Duffus is shown dressed for hunting and the image conforms to the traditional Gaelic ideal of the aristocrat as ‘the hunter of deer’.