Painting (Portrait)

Description

Among the Maryland merchants and planters, Peale found a clientele for elegant, large-scale group portraits such as The Edward Lloyd Family. Commissioned by the elder brother of Richard Bennett Lloyd, Peale's portrait depicts Edward, his wife Elizabeth Tayloe, and their daughter Anne wearing a range of rich textures. The background shows the Wye River running through the fertile Lloyd estate, with a structure suggesting Wye House in the distance. Rather than an actual house, the building reflects a garden pavilion based on an architectural design by English architect Isaac Ware, signaling the cosmopolitanism of both sitters and the artist. About fifty years later, the enslaved Frederick Douglass was brought by his grandmother to live at Wye House, a reminder that the prosperity of the Lloyds was built upon the economy of enslavement.