Group portrait possibly of the artist and her family in a landscape

This group portrait showing the artist with her family, executed in 1818 or 1819, beautifully captures Taylor's skill in grouping figures in an outdoor setting. The artist's eldest son Jonathan stands beside his father to the left of the composition and between husband and wife are shown three of their other children Susanna, Sarah and John, the latter seated on his mother's lap. To the artist's right is her fifth child Henry who had died in 1818. Maria Spilsbury Taylor's son wrote of his mother that 'in person she was tall, and some state, lovely in face, certainly her eyes were full of expression and her manner exceedingly gentle and calm' - her self-portrait here reflects this.
Born in London Maria Spilsbury, as she was before her marriage in 1809 to John Taylor, was the daughter of Jonathan Spilsbury (1737-1812), a portrait painter and print-maker and Rebecca, née Chapman (1748-1812). She exhibited in London at the Royal Academy between 1792 and 1794 and again in 1799-1808. She came to Ireland after her marriage and exhibited at the Royal Hibernian Society in 1813 and 1814. A number of her sketch books have recently been discovered which stand out as being among the most valuable pictorial records of country life in Ireland during the first decades of the nineteenth century.