Roslin painted this portrait of Carl Linnaeus in 1775, in the weeks before he left Sweden for Paris for good — the city where he had been the most sought-after portraitist of the age for more than twenty years. The museum’s own account of the commission records that the botanist travelled to Stockholm especially to sit for him, and noted afterwards, with pleasure, that Roslin had asked him nothing for the work. The artist’s reasons were less disinterested: he meant to have the portrait engraved and to sell the prints while the painting hung at the Paris Salon, and the original then came back to Stockholm, very probably together with the copy he had made for Linnaeus himself. It was made in 1775 and measures 56 × 46 cm.
Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778) was the Swedish naturalist whose Systema Naturae gave the living world the two-part naming system it still uses, and by the 1770s he was the most celebrated scientist in Europe; this portrait belongs to the last years of his life. Alexander Roslin (1718–1793) was born at Malmö, trained under Georg Engelhard Schröder, worked in Bayreuth, Dresden and Rome and settled in Paris in 1752, where he was received into the Académie royale and went on to paint the court of Louis XV, the Russian imperial family and the aristocracy of half of Europe. It is held in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.