This portrait by Joseph Badger is one of a pair of paintings that unassumingly marks a turning point in American painting, one not particularly beneficial to the artist. Painted when Badger was forty-nine, the portrait serves as a pendant to one of Reds wife painted at the same time by John Singleton Copley. The execution of pendant portraits by different artists is unusual but, in this case, functions on two levels: in practical terms to show a man proudly presenting his family to the viewer, and on an historical level to represent the moment of transition from the older Badger to Copley, the young genius who, only nineteen years of age in 1757, dominated American portraiture in the 1760s and early 1770s.