Jan de Bray

In 1669 Jan de Bray painted Cleopatra dissolving a pearl in wine before Mark Antony, a lavish banquet scene. The faces around the table were his own family, cast as the ancient court, with the painter himself among them.

De Bray spent his whole life in Haarlem, home of the painter Frans Hals, and he specialised in the portrait historié, the trick of dressing living people as figures from history or the Bible. He learned it partly from his father, the painter Salomon de Bray. This second version of the Cleopatra scene carries a private grief its buyers may not have known: when he made it, most of the relatives he had gathered around that table were already dead. The plague that swept Haarlem in 1663 and 1664 had taken his father, his mother, and several of his brothers and sisters within a few weeks.

He went on painting sober civic portraits for Haarlem's guilds and charities for another 30 years, married more than once, and lost much of his money in a failed land-drainage scheme before he died in 1697.