La familia Baillie

Gainsborough finished this large family group around 1784, and meant to show it at the Royal Academy's exhibition that year. He never did. That spring he quarrelled with the Academy over how high his pictures were being hung, withdrew everything, and never exhibited there again, choosing to show his work at his own house in London instead. So this easy, informal portrait, the parents and their children arranged out of doors like figures in a landscape, belongs to the very moment he walked away from the country's official art world. The sitters were the family of James Baillie, a Scottish merchant whose fortune came from sugar plantations and enslaved labour in the West Indies. The picture entered the national collection in 1868 and now hangs at Tate Britain.