This is the first group study for the large family portrait which was commissioned by Hugh Spottiswoode for the National Portrait Gallery and exhibited at the Royal Academy of 1913 (no.170). It was presented to Queen Mary by the artist that year and can be seen as a precursor of Lavery's portrait interiors of the late 1920s.

Lavery recounts in his autobiography that he received the commission in 1912. He had written in August 1911 about sittings from George V and Queen Mary. Sittings, in Buckingham Palace, were not however granted until early 1913, leaving Lavery little time before the Royal Academy exhibition. The King sat on 20th, 23rd and 25th February and 4th and 13th April 1913. Queen Mary recorded sittings on 19th, 22nd, 24th and 26th February. The King and Queen showed considerable interest in this monumental family portrait. They had suggested at the start that the only other family members to be depicted should be the Prince of Wales and Princess Mary. Lavery relates, 'The Queen expressed a wish to see my idea for the grouping, and a sketch I made was pronounced satisfactory so I was permitted the use of the White Drawing Room as studio.' Although the choice of this state room favoured Lavery's restricted palette, the approved sketch was not the last word. Large-scale studies of the King and Queen were made. A second group study records a change of the table on which the King rests his right hand, and a final figure study of the King has a more commanding frontal pose and dispenses with the table. Some of these changes may result from the royal family's close involvement in the portrait. Certainly the King's and Queen s visits to the artist's studio, on 9th March and 10th April, to see the portrait's progress betoken more than usual interest. Indeed, on one of these visits the King and Queen both applied royal blue paint to a Garter riband in the picture.

The final painting appears uneasy to modern eyes. Lavery records that it was commissioned to be after the manner of Franz Xaver Winterhalter's 1846 royal family picture, then as now in Buckingham Palace. However, the royal decision to leave out the younger members of the family and Prince Albert, who was at sea, deprived Lavery of depicting family intimacy and the spontaneity of young children. His figures are stiff, isolated and formal. Lavery's portrait falters between a public and private image, the symbolic and the documentary. In 1913, however, its unresolved nature may have been less noticeable, the isolated figure of the King conforming to contemporary notions of him as a 'father-figure to the whole empire, yet also in his own right the head of a family with which all could identify'.

Text adapted from The Quest for Albion: Monarchy and the Patronage of British Painting, London 1998