Sir Brooke Boothby was a widely-travelled Derbyshire landowner and a member of the Lichfield literary circle. He is shown here lying by a stream, or 'brook', in his native Derbyshire, holding a copy of Rousseau Juge de Jean-Jacques which he had recently edited.

Boothby's devotion to the revolutionary ideas of his friend, the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, made him a lover of nature. Wright shows him as the Rousseau-esque 'man of feeling' communing with the natural world. He was a founder-member of the Lichfield Botanical Society and rests among burdock leaves.