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Johann Elias Haid (German, 1739-1809) - William Pitt The Younger, Mezzotint Etching. The Right Honorable William Pitt, Chancellor of the Exchequer. 21x14cm. William Pitt the Younger (1759-1806) was a prominent British Tory statesman of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He became the youngest prime minister of Great Britain in 1783 at the age of 24 and the first prime minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland as of January 1801. He left office in March 1801, but served as prime minister again from 1804 until his death in 1806. He was also Chancellor of the Exchequer for all of his time as prime minister. He is known as "the Younger" to distinguish him from his father, William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham, who is customarily referred to as William Pitt the Elder and had previously served as prime minister. Johann Elias Haid was born in 1739, was a German engraver, portrait painter, mezzotint artist and publisher. The son of the artist and publisher Johann Jacob Haid, who had moved to Augsburg. He became his student and closest collaborator. After his death he took over the artistic and entrepreneurial direction of his father's publishing house, which he renamed "J. J. Haid & Sohn” continued. In 1768 he won the First Prize of the Imperial City Academy of Art in Augsburg , whose Protestant director (this office was always held equally between denominations) he was from 1786 to 1808. Haid made several trips to European countries and portrayed many celebrities of his time: Alessandro Cagliostro, Johann Caspar Fussli , Markus Christoph Koch von Gailenbach, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire and Johann Joachim Winckelmann were models for him. As early as 1774 he had started work on a portrait collection of famous scholars, which he continued until the 1790s and which eventually comprised 57 portraits. From 1778 he worked on a total of 132 drawings by Johann Caspar Fussli for "The Knight's Johann Carl Hedlinger's Medal Work", which appeared in 1781.