Ivan Vishnyakov was a master of the ceremonial portrait — he painted Empress Elizabeth Petrovna and the court nobility. He also restored paintings, painted icons, and supervised painting palaces, churches, and theatres in St. Petersburg. Unfortunately, few of his works have been preserved. Only five portraits have survived to our time, including the portraits of Sarah and William Fairmores.

In the painting, William George is seven or eight years old, therefore Vishnyakov is thought to have painted the boy in the second half of the 1750s. According to the tradition of the Elizabethan epoch, children were depicted as little adults — William George is depicted wearing the uniform of a Preobrazhensky Regiment officer.

Some details of the painting look like parsuna, the kind of painting wide-spread in the 17th-18th centuries. Parsuna (from the Latin persona, ‘person’) is an early primitive genre of the portrait, more like icon painting. This type of painting is decorative, devoid of dynamics, characterised by pure colours without half-tones, depicting the character en face.

William George Fairmore became a brigadier in the Preobrazhensky Regiment. He married the daughter of Colonel Ludolf von Albrecht. They did not have children and both Fairmore portraits were passed on from generation to generation within the Albrecht family. In 1907, the family sold the paintings to the Russian Museum.