Philippe Mercier served as Painter and Librarian to Frederick, Prince of Wales, from 1728 until 1738. There are three versions of this celebrated image; the other two (National Trust and National Portrait Gallery) are set out of doors with the so-called ‘Dutch House’ at Kew in the background. Since the events depicted here make more sense indoors it is usually assumed that this is the first treatment of the theme, however the date of 1733 inscribed on the National Portrait Gallery version provides an acceptable dating for all three.

The Prince of Wales is shown playing the cello, accompanied by his sister Princess Anne (1709-59) at the harpsichord; Princess Caroline (1713-57) plays the mandora (a type of lute) and Amelia (1711-86) reads a volume of Milton’s poems. The setting seems to be specific - the red brick back of a building in the background is certainly not an artist’s impression of an ideal palace — but it is impossible to identify with certainty. The sconce to the right (one of a group supplied in 1733 by Benjamin Goodison, c.1700-67) and the painting of the sleeping Endymion on the wall (by Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini) are both accurately recorded and still in the Royal Collection.

The Princesses are dressed, in Aileen Ribeiro’s words, ‘with an almost bourgeois sobriety’, with ‘closed gowns’ fastened across the bodice, covering a white linen kerchief round the neck and wearing plain caps with lappets, one pinned up, one hanging down and the last fastened under the chin. The more formally dressed Frederick is given centre stage and yet the effect of the scene is one of informality, ensemble music-making and sibling harmony (something which in reality was starting to evaporate at this time).

English noblemen would have been unlikely to play the cello as well as Frederick or to be depicted engaged in the activity with such eagerness. Lord Hervey clearly found Frederick’s playing undignified, likening it to Nero’s public performances on the lyre and recalling this royal ‘fiddler once or twice a week during this whole summer at Kensington seated close to an open window of his apartment, with his violoncello between his legs, singing French and Italian songs to his own playing for an hour or two together, whilst his audience was composed of all the underling servants and rabble of the palace.’ Hervey concludes by asking ‘how much does such a buffoon fiddler debase the title of a Prince of Wales’ (Memoirs, 1737). Princess Anne had been taught by Handel; her harpsichord playing was by all accounts worthy of her master and nobody at this date would have thought that playing or singing debased the title of Princess Royal.

If the musical application seems rather Germanic, there is a tribute here to English culture typical of Frederick, Prince of Wales: Amelia reads from Milton, adopting a listening pose which recalls that of the inspired Endymion on the wall behind; she is like a personification of the pleasure of the scene as she smile gently at the viewer. Given that Milton’s poetry is generally grave, it is at least possible that she is intended to represent the character of Mirth or ‘L’Allegro’ from Milton’s pair of poems of 1631-2, L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, which were later set to music by Handel. Milton’s L’Allegro concludes with the following celebration of the beauties of music:

‘Lap me in soft Lydian airs,
Married to immortal verse,
Such as the meeting soul may pierce
In notes with many a winding bout
Of linkéd sweetness long drawn out,
With wanton heed and giddy cunning,
The melting voice through mazes running,
Untwisting all the chains that tie
The hidden soul of harmony;
That Orpheus’ self may heave his head
From golden slumber on a bed
Of heaped Elysian flow’rs, and hear
Such strains as would have won the ear
Of Pluto, to have quite set free
His half-regained Eurydice.
These delights if thou canst give,
Mirth, with thee I mean to live.’

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