Portrait of a Family, Probably that of Richard Streatfeild
Date:
ca. 1645
Materials & Techniques:
Oil on canvas
Dimensions:
42 x 49 inches (106.7 x 124.5 cm)
Credit Line:
Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection
Copyright Status:
Public Domain
Accession Number:
B1981.25.241
Classification:
Paintings
Collection:
Paintings and Sculpture
Subject Terms:
baby | cherries | pointing | deaths | conversation piece | skulls (skeleton components) | children | black | collar | cap | couple | portrait | man | woman | curtain | family | husband | wife
Currently On View:
Not on view
Exhibition History:
In a New Light: Paintings from the Yale Center for British Art (Yale University Art Gallery, 2023-03-24 - 2023-12-03)No More Fog at the Channel - Holbein to Hockney - 500 Years of British Art (Fundación Juan March, 2012-10-05 - 2013-01-20)This Other Eden : British Paintings from the Paul Mellon Collection at Yale (Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1998-05-01 - 1998-07-05)This Other Eden : British Paintings from the Paul Mellon Collection at Yale (Queensland Art Gallery, 1998-07-15 - 1998-09-06)This Other Eden : British Paintings from the Paul Mellon Collection at Yale (Art Gallery of South Australia, 1998-09-16 - 1998-11-15)Juxtapositions (Yale Center for British Art, 1997-11-19 - 1998-01-04)The Royalist at War - William Dobson 1611-46 (National Portrait Gallery, 1983-10-28 - 1984-01-08)
Publications:
Christie's Sale Catalogue : Important English Pictures : 19 November 1965, Christie's, November 19, 1965, pp. 24-27 (addenda), Lot 28, Fiche B51 (YCBA)Malcolm Cormack, Concise Catalogue of Paintings in the Yale Center for British Art, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT, 1985, pp. 88-89, N590.2 A83 (YCBA)Antonia Fraser, The weaker vessel, woman's lot in seventeenth-century England , Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1984, p. 12, HQ1593 F7 (YCBA)Julia Marciari-Alexander, This other Eden : Paintings from the Yale Center for British Art, , Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT, 1998, pp. 32-33, no. 5, ND1314.3 Y36 1998 (YCBA)Paul Mellon's Legacy : a passion for British art [large print labels], , Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT, 2007, v. 3, N5220 M552 P381 2007 OVERSIZE (YCBA)Malcolm Rogers, Royalists on parade, William Dobson , 1994, pp. 72-86, V 0375 (YCBA)Malcolm Rogers, William Dobson, 1611-46, National Portrait Gallery, London, 1983, pp. 65-7, no. 29, NJ18 D632 R65 (YCBA)Some Little Known Portraits at the Royal Academy, Burlington Magazine, vol. 99,no.646, January, 1957, pp. 24-27, no. 28, N1 B87 + (YCBA)Angus Trumble, The Finger : A Handbook, , Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2010, p. 82, GT498.F46 T78 2010 (YCBA)Yale Center for British Art, Selected paintings, drawings & books, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 1977, p. 5, N590.2 A82 (YCBA)
Gallery Label:
Anthony Van Dyck’s death in 1641 allowed William Dobson, an Englishman, to become the preeminent court portrait painter. Dobson’s sixty or so surviving canvases were all painted during the early 1640s in Oxford, where Charles I held court during the Civil War. When Oxford fell to the Parliamentarians, Dobson moved to London, where, lacking patronage, he was imprisoned for debt and died aged thirty-six. This group portrait is a remarkable representation of a gentry family: the Streatfeilds were ironmasters and wool merchants who rose to become landowners in Kent. It is also a memento mori portrait. The mother points toward her eldest child, singling her out as the recently departed. A red mantle further distinguishes her from the rest of the family, who are dressed in somber black. The multiple skulls foreshadow the ultimate fate of everyone in the portrait. The two children on the left were finished by another artist. Gallery label for installation of YCBA collection, 2016