Lady Elizabeth Delmé and Her Children

When Lady Elizabeth Delmé brought her two eldest children to Reynolds's studio in the spring of 1777, he was the most sought-after portraitist in Britain and the first president of its new Royal Academy. His ambition was to lift English portraiture to the level of the old Italian masters, and here he borrows the pyramid of mother and children straight from Raphael's Madonnas, dressing an aristocratic family in the pose of a sacred one. Lady Elizabeth was a daughter of the Earl of Carlisle and had married a member of Parliament. The setting is deliberately informal, a bank of trees and open sky, with the family Skye terrier looking up attentively from the folds of her dress.