Portrait of the Donker Family

A Dutch family portrait like this one had a job beyond likeness. Around 1660, in the busy port of Rotterdam, a prosperous household would commission a group portrait to fix itself in paint, with parents and children arranged together in their own interior, dressed in their sober best, a record of the family as it stood at that moment. Pieter Merkelbach painted the Donker family in exactly that spirit, on a wide canvas a little over a metre across. The convention was strict, so the interest lies in the small things a painter was allowed: the particular faces, the ages of the children, the good black cloth and white linen that signalled respectability without display. Portraits like this are often the only trace a middling merchant family left behind, which is why the sitters' name has outlasted nearly everything else about them.