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**William Doughty (1757–1782)** was a British painter and engraver born in York, England. His brief career centered on portraiture and reproductive prints in the late eighteenth-century British tradition.)
In 1776 he became a pupil of Sir Joshua Reynolds, whose influence shaped much of his work. After an unsuccessful attempt to establish himself as a portrait painter in Ireland, Doughty settled in London in 1779. The following year he married a servant from Reynolds’s household and sailed for Bengal; his ship was captured by French and Spanish forces, and he was taken to Lisbon, where he died in 1782 at about age twenty-five.)
Doughty exhibited two paintings—a mythological subject titled *Circe* and a portrait of Reynolds himself—but achieved greater success with his etchings and mezzotints. Among his notable prints are portraits after Reynolds of Admiral Keppel, the poet William Mason, Mary Palmer (later Marchioness of Thomond), and Dr. Samuel Johnson, as well as an independent etching of the sitter Bacon Morritt after a design by the pastel painter Lewis Vaslet.
Although his life was short, Doughty’s prints preserve important likenesses of Georgian-era figures and are held in major collections including the National Portrait Gallery, London, the Tate, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His self-portrait and reproductive engravings continue to document the artistic networks of Reynolds’s studio and the vibrant print culture of the period.