Thomas Thorild was a leading representative of the pre-Romantic movement in Swedish literature and philosophy. As a freethinker, he made a lot of enemies. He was an advocate, for example, of full freedom of the press, women’s equality with men, and abolition of the Diet of Estates. He coined the aphorism “It is a great thing to think freely, but greater still to think correctly”. This portrait was a design for the stipple engraving in colour which Berndes made of Thorild at the end of the 18th century.