This group portrait shows Robert James, together with his wife Mary and two daughters Elizabeth and Ann. James, aged fifty-one at this time, was for many years Secretary to the East India Company. Devis specialized in painting fashionable small-scale portrait groups or 'conversation pieces’ set in domestic interiors or spacious parkland. Although such pictures were intended to portray family groups in a private setting, they can often appear quite formal, and in Devis’s case, even stiff. However, for a man such as James, a display of material wealth and worldly success was perhaps more meaningful than family intimacy.
<bdi><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/en:Arthur_Devis" class="extiw" title="w:en:Arthur Devis"><span title="painter from Great Britain (1712-1787)">Arthur Devis</span></a>
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1751<div style="display: none;">date QS:P571,+1751-00-00T00:00:00Z/9</div>
<a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/devis-the-james-family-n05281">Tate Britain</a>