This seventeenth-century Dutch family portrait (and others like it) provided the inspiration for innumerable eighteenth-century English conversation pieces, recording the way of life of family groups or friends. It depicts the fine things enjoyed by the prosperous middle class – white starched linen, shiny black silk, silver, glass, a Turkish carpet, wine and lap dogs. It also suggests an easy familiarity with these things, a comfortable, almost complacent, informality.

Acquired by George IV in 1811, when Prince Regent