Portrait of Rutger Jan Schimmelpenninck and Catharina Nahuys with their Children

From 1798 to 1802 Rutger Jan Schimmelpenninck lived in Paris as envoy of the Batavian Republic, the Dutch state set up under French protection in 1795. In March 1802 he signed the Peace of Amiens for his country, the treaty that for a short while ended the war between France and Britain. Prud'hon painted the family in those same months. He placed them in a park, on a canvas more than two and a half metres tall. Schimmelpenninck sits on a rock with a book on his knee, and his wife, Catharina Nahuys, stands against the tree beside him in the high-waisted white dress then fashionable in Paris. Their children, Catharina and Gerrit, stand apart with a garland of flowers and a goat. Prud'hon first painted the mother leaning on her husband's shoulder with both arms before he changed the pose.