This painting is considered the most physically and psychologically striking colonial portrait at Bowdoin, Thomas Flucker was an important political figure in late eighteenth-century Boston. A Tory, he fled to England in 1775. It has been suggested that the painting’s somber palette and empty background (without the traditional attributes which situate the sitter in society) may allude to the gathering storm clouds and upheavals which would culminate in the American Revolution.