Edward Jean Conrad Hamman (1819-1888) specialised in genre paintings and works depicting subjects from history. He trained at Antwerp Academy where he was awarded a medal in 1842 and afterwards established himself in Paris where he received a multitude of further accolades, including the Legion d’Honneur. Hamman was also admitted to the Order of Leopold of his native Belgium.

A young woman and her older male companion rest on the verge of a path overlooking a valley of lush vegetation. Both are depicted in full-length although the man is seated upon a grassy bank while the woman stands beside him, looking down upon him; both figures are dressed in the fashionable attire of the eighteenth-century gentry. He wears an elaborately-trimmed coat and wig and rests a cane against his knee; she is bedecked in a white, full-skirted dress and red jacket with a small black hat perched on top of her coiffured curls. The couple appear to have recently dismounted as the woman carries a riding crop and two horses can be seen in the clearing beyond. A white country house is seen in the distance beneath a calm, blue sky. 
 
The title – ‘The Boredom of the Wealthy’ – is intended to suggest the spiritual emptiness of the cynical and the spoilt. She would seem to have married an exhausted old voluptuary for money and be discontended with the bargain. An English equivalent of this couple appeared a few years later in Dicken's Bleak House of 1852-3, called Sir Leicester and Lady Dedlock.