William Yelverton Davenport

Thomas Gainsborough executed this oil on canvas portrait in 1786, originally commissioning it for the sitter, William Yelverton Davenport, at Davenport House in Worfield, Shropshire. The work remained within the Davenport family by descent until 1890, when it passed to Mrs. Cuthbert Leicester-Warren. It subsequently entered the commercial market through M. Knoedler & Co. and John Levy Galleries in New York before being acquired by Benjamin Franklin Jones, Jr. of Sewickley Heights, Pennsylvania, by 1925.

Following Jones's death, his wife inherited the painting and lent it to a 1925 exhibition in Pittsburgh. The portrait was sold at Parke-Bernet in New York on December 4–5, 1941, to William Robertson Coe of Oyster Bay, Long Island. Coe later transferred the work to the Coe Foundation, which gifted it to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., in 1961.

The painting is now in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., having been given by the Coe Foundation in 1961. Prior to that, it passed from the sitter William Davenport to his daughter‑in‑law Mrs. Cuthbert Leicester‑Warren, then through dealers A.J. Finberg, M. Knoedler & Co., and John Levy Galleries to Benjamin Franklin Jones Jr., who owned it by 1925 and lent it to a Pittsburgh exhibition that year. After Jones’s death it went to William Robertson Coe, the Coe Foundation, and finally to the NGA as a gift. The sources do not record an accession or inventory number for the work.