# Lady Elizabeth Delmé and her Children [View the canonical artwork record]() ## Artwork - Artist: [REYNOLDS, Sir Joshua]() - Date: 1751-1800 - Technique: Oil on canvas, 239 x 147 cm ## Commentary English portrait painting after 1750 moved in the direction of naturalness. Sir Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough - exact contemporaries - were the two greatest English portrait painters of the eighteenth century, but their pictures were of quite different types. Reynolds was a temperamental painter who loved to yield to the excitement of actual painting. For all that, he was acutely concerned over all questions of technique, and throughout his life he studied the pictures of the masters, especially of Rembrandt and Rubens, in an effort to penetrate their secret. In the Baroque manner he painted his figures in the action and attitude best fitted to the sitter's character. When his sitters were women, he approached the sensuousness of Rubens. ## Related artworks - [Admiral Sir Edward Hughes]() - [Captain Robert Orme]() - [Colonel George K. H. Coussmaker, Grenadier Guards]() - [Commodore Augustus Keppel]() - [Continence of Scipio]() - [Cupid Untying the Zone of Venus]() - [Francis Rawdon-Hastings]() - [General Sir Banastre Tarleton]() - [George Clive and his Family with an Indian Maid]() - [Lady Cockburn and her Three Eldest Sons]() - [Lady Sunderlin]() - [Master Hare]() ## Attribution [Web Gallery of Art]()