A Dutch Family Group (Portrait of a Man, Woman and Two Girls)
1633
Like 'A Dutch Family Group (Portrait of Two Boys)' [NG 824] by Cool, this picture is a fragment from a larger panel. The couple and their two daughters would have formed the right side of the original composition. This section was discovered with a London dealer in 1963, and bought for the Scottish National Gallery to be reunited with the fragment with the two boys. Unfortunately, the two pieces cannot be reconstructed, as the portion with the boys has been cropped so extensively that too much of the original picture is missing. This fragment was inscribed with the date 1633 and the ages of some of the figures in the original picture; the man and wife are both forty, the boys sixteen and thirteen, and the older girl is ten.
