The Braddyll Family

Reynolds's The Braddyll Family from 1789, held in the Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge, is one of his last major group portraits, completed when failing eyesight was forcing him toward more broadly handled paint and simpler compositional schemes. Wilson Crosbie Braddyll and his family are shown in the landscape setting that Reynolds consistently favored for family groups — the open air suggesting both the pastoral idyll of landed gentry life and the continuity of a family with its ancestral estate. By 1789 Reynolds was sixty-six and conscious that his productive years were ending; the following year he would deliver his last Discourse to the Royal Academy and resign the presidency following a dispute with the institution. The Fitzwilliam Museum's holding connects this late Reynolds to one of the finest university art collections in Britain, built through centuries of Cambridge acquisition and benefaction; the painting documents Reynolds's continued ambition even as physical decline was limiting his technical resources.

Reynolds groups the family with characteristic informality in a landscape setting. Despite the technical challenges of his declining eyesight, the painting maintains the warm palette and the graceful compositional balance of his earlier family portraits.