The Braddyll Family

This portrait was painted in 1789, the year revolution broke out across the Channel in France, and it shows an English landed family looking entirely at ease. Wilson Gale-Braddyll was a Member of Parliament and a Groom of the Bedchamber to the Prince of Wales. His wife Jane sat eight times for the picture, while he and their son Thomas came only five times each. Jane strokes the ear of her spaniel, and behind the boy stands a copy of the Medici Vase, a Roman antiquity much copied in the 18th century. The Fitzwilliam thinks this was probably the last portrait Reynolds painted before blindness ended his career. In 1939 Lord Rothschild gave it to the Lord Baldwin Fund, which helped refugees from Nazi persecution, and it was sold at Christie's to raise money for them.