This painting (unlike Zoffany’s earlier interior portraits of royal children) was evidently conceived as a public conversation piece, immediately engraved by Richard Earlom (1743-1822), published 29 October 1770, and exhibited at the Royal Academy. This seems to be the type of image Hogarth was planning for his unsuccessful group portrait of the family of George II (Royal Collection); as in that case Zoffany chose (or was required) to provide an oil sketch for the composition which is also still in the Royal Collection. The sketch envisages a fairly conventional dynastic family group portrait: the King presides between the Princes (George, Frederick, William and Edward) to his right in front of an instructive garden statue of Hercules wrestling an opponent to the floor and the Queen with the Princesses (Charlotte and Augusta to his left) in front of the crown, orb and sceptre and an arrangement of columns and curtain typical from formal portraiture. Some informal disruption characteristic of the conversation piece is introduced: Prince William plays with a parrot while the two semi-naked babies of the family are engaged in vigorous play with a dog (in the case of Edward) and their attentive elder sister (in the case of Augusta). These details are restrained in the final version: the babies are fully dressed, and all the children pay more attention to the artist and less to their as playthings than they do in the sketch. Such obvious concern for the business of a portrait sitting is exactly what the conservation piece proper seeks to avoid. The result therefore is stiff and conventional.

Zoffany’s old master reference is here clearly to Van Dyck: the royal family are all in ‘VanDyke dress’, a fashionable style of the day popular for masquerades and portrait sittings; and there are generic references to the conventions of Van Dyck’s portraiture, as if this were a record of a lost portrait of Charles I’s family. The two eldest Princes, George and Frederick, are precisely modelled on Van Dyck’s portraits of George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham, and his brother, Lord Francis Villiers in the Royal Collection, the only difference being that they link arms affectionately, as becomes children of the age of sensibility.

Text adapted from The Conversation Piece: Scenes of fashionable life, London, 2009