Portrait of Caroline, Henry Frederick and Emily, the Children of Henry Walker, Esq. of Blyth Hall, Nottingham, and of Clifton Park and Eastwood House York (1775-1860) and his wife Elizabeth Abney Walker (1786-1850)

This large-scale oil painting by Ramsay Richard Reinagle shows the three children of the wealthy Rotherham iron manufacturer Henry Walker (1785-1860).

The Walker family iron- and steelworks, co-founded by Henry’s grandfather in Rotherham in 1746, was one of the largest iron foundries in the country. It supplied iron for bridges (including Southwark Bridge in London) and cannons, such as those used by the British army during the Napoleonic wars. Clifton House (now Clifton Park Museum), built in 1783 by the architect John Carr, was the Walker family home until 1861.

Henry Walker commissioned this portrait of his children from Reinagle, a fashionable London painter who became a Royal Academician in 1823.

The portrait of the Walker children is a companion piece to Reinagle’s portraits of the children’s parents, which were donated to Clifton Park Museum in 1944 by family descendants.