The Hope Family of Sydenham, Kent

The white-haired man seated on the left is Henry Hope. He was born in Massachusetts in 1735, went to Amsterdam as a young man to work in his uncles' bank, and turned Hope and Company into one of the great financial houses of Europe. In October 1794, as French armies closed in on the Dutch Republic, he sailed for England and took some 372 of his paintings with him. West painted him here in London in 1802, among the household he had gathered. High on the left stands a model of Welgelegen, the pavilion Hope had built for himself outside Haarlem.

The man standing on the right is John Williams. Hope took him into the firm, arranged his marriage to his sister's daughter, and Williams added Hope to his name. A year after this canvas was signed, Hope and Company and the London bank of Baring raised the loans that allowed the United States to buy Louisiana from Napoleon. By 1904, when the picture came up for sale in London, the catalogue called it the family of Adrian Hope, and the Museum of Fine Arts bought it two years later.