La famille Bridges

Constable was 28 in 1804, unknown, and living largely on portrait commissions from families around his corner of Essex while the landscapes went unsold. George Bridges was a corn merchant and country banker at Lawford Place, and he wanted himself, his wife Mary and all eight of their children in one canvas, which turned into one of the largest portraits Constable ever painted. The room is their drawing room and the tower through the window is Lawford church. Their eldest son, George Wilson Bridges, was 16 that year. He went out to Jamaica as an Anglican rector, spent the 1820s and 1830s writing in defence of slavery there, and after his family broke apart he left the West Indies and took up the new paper photography of William Henry Fox Talbot, making some 1,700 pictures around the Mediterranean.