The family of the engraver Matthäus Merian I (1593-1650)

By 1642 the Thirty Years' War had ground on for more than two decades, and Frankfurt, the great book-fair city, was where the Merian workshop turned out the engraved town views that were selling right across Europe. That year the eldest son came home from his travels and painted his own family gathered around the father, Matthäus Merian the Elder, the most sought-after engraver of the age.

It reads at first as a straightforward group portrait. Then you notice what the children are holding. One shows a drawing after the Belvedere Torso, an antique fragment studied in every workshop of the day. The youngest carries a plaster cast of the head from the Laocoön group. These are the tools of the trade the household lived by, a family presenting itself as a dynasty of image-makers. At the centre sits the mother, Maria Magdalena de Bry, herself the daughter of an engraver.

People often search the row of children for Maria Sibylla Merian, the daughter who grew into a celebrated naturalist and illustrator. She is not here. She was born in 1647, from Merian's later marriage, a few years after this picture was made.