A Family beside the Tomb of Willem I (William the Silent) in the Nieuwe Kerk, Delft

By the 1640s, visiting the tomb of William of Orange in Delft was something respectable Dutch families did. William, remembered as William the Silent, had led the revolt against Spanish rule and was shot dead in Delft in 1584. The Dutch Republic gave him a monument to match, a great tomb of marble and bronze in the Nieuwe Kerk, designed by the Amsterdam sculptor Hendrick de Keyser and finished in the early 1620s.

In 1645 an unknown family, a father, a mother and two sons, all in formal black, had themselves painted beside it. Dirck van Delen, who spent much of his career inventing buildings, here built his picture around a real monument, and a portrait at the tomb showed where a family's loyalties lay. The war with Spain was still not over. Two years later William's son, the stadtholder Frederick Henry, was buried in the vault beneath that same tomb.