Richard Arkwright Junior (1755–1843), with His Wife Mary, and Daughter Anne

This 1790 family portrait of Richard Arkwright Junior with his wife Mary and daughter Anne documents the second generation of the Arkwright dynasty that transformed British industry. The younger Arkwright continued his father's cotton manufacturing empire, and Wright served as the family's preferred painter. Joseph Wright of Derby's portraits served the prosperous industrial and professional class of the English Midlands — manufacturers, engineers, merchants, and professional men whose social ambitions required the dignity of oil portraiture while their practical identities differed markedly from the aristocratic subjects of Reynolds or Gainsborough. Wright's portraits have the quality of his genre paintings transposed to the portrait format: the subjects are observed with complete attention and rendered with technical mastery, but the social context — the emerging industrial capitalism of the Midlands, the specific world of Derby and its surrounding towns — gives his portraits their distinctive character as documents of a new social class.

The group portrait arranges the family in an informal domestic setting, with Wright's naturalistic approach creating an image of comfortable prosperity without the aristocratic pretension of London portraits.