According to Vose Galleries, this portrait descended in the Coffin family of Nantucket, one of the original founding families of this Massachusetts shipping island. Identified as Ebenezer Coffin (1678–1730), the bewigged sitter assumes the posture of an English gentleman, with his left hand positioned on his hip near his sword and his right hand clutching a letter that may refer to his shipping business, which is likewise alluded to by the sloop in the background. Coffin is recorded in 1714 building the sloop Nonsuch, named after Elizabeth I’s favorite country palace. His 1730 will indicates his considerable estate of two thousand pounds, including properties in Nantucket, Tuckernut, and Boston.

Despite the poor condition of the painting, the scholar Mary Black has attributed the painting to Nehemiah Partridge. Nehemiah was the son of William Partridge (c. 1652–1728) and Mary Brown Partridge. He is recorded in Boston in 1712–14, where he worked as a japanner and painter of ships and portraits; in New York City and in Albany from 1715–21; possibly in Newport and Tidewater, Virginia, in 1722–23; and in the upper Hudson River Valley in 1724–25. Nehemiah Partridge may have painted Coffin in Boston around 1714 to mark the commissioning of his ship Nonsuch.
 
Related examples: Identical portrait of sitter, which may be a study by Partridge for the Bayou Bend painting, oil on panel, 10 3/8 x 13 1/4 in., spurious inscription by a later hand: “R. Feake/AD-1728”; Department of Collections, Williamsburg; attributed to Nehemiah Partridge (?), Captain Samuel Doty, c. 1730, Shelburne Museum, Shelburne, Vermont; attributed to Nehemiah Partridge, Captain Benjamin Ellery, Sr., c. 1717, Newport Historical Society.

Book excerpt: David B. Warren, Michael K. Brown, Elizabeth Ann Coleman, and Emily Ballew Neff. American Decorative Arts and Paintings in the Bayou Bend Collection. Houston: Princeton Univ. Press, 1998.