Portrait of Philip Herbert,4th Earl of Pembroke, his second wife Lady Anne Clifford,14th Baroness of Clifford and his surviving children by his first marriage and Lady Mary Villiers

In 1635 the court of Charles I was at its most gilded, and Van Dyck was the man who made it look that way. This group portrait is the largest painting he ever made, almost seventeen feet across, and a room was built to hold it: the Double Cube at Wilton House, whose Palladian proportions Inigo Jones laid out in these same years. Ten figures stand just over life size. At the centre is the betrothal of the earl's son to Lady Mary Villiers, daughter of the assassinated Duke of Buckingham. Within a decade the sitter, Philip Herbert, Lord Chamberlain to the King, would break with Charles and side with Parliament in the civil war.