We don’t know the rules of this game, apparently played by the fashionable youth of seventeenth-century Dordrecht. Presumably the players shed a garment every time they fail in some humorous task. The defrocked victim is a self-portrait; the figure behind him is a portrait of his sister, summoning her next target. Parlour games in art are usually metaphors for love – in this case conveying the idea that, in love, men should learn to lose gracefully.

Acquired by George IV in 1803, when Prince of Wales