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Van Dyck’s 1637 portrait of Charles I’s children became one of the most iconic pictures of the seventeenth century, particularly amongst Royalist supporters. Here, the future Charles II is placed centre stage and guarded by - but also mastering with his authority - an enormous mastiff. To his left are Princess Mary and James, Duke of York, while to the right are Princesses Elizabeth and Anne. Charles is given an appropriately grown-up stance and demeanour with his adult costume, but his siblings retain their youthful charm and sensitivity. The portrait conveys the message of healthy and happy brood of royal heirs.

Charles I was the first English king to seek to portray the royal family as just that, a family, rather than individual figures of power. The idea was to present Charles as the happy monarch ruling a happy nation, with both the private family and public realm united in contentedness. Van Dyck was central to this message, and his first commission for Charles was the Great Peece at Whitehall, in which Charles and his Queen are seen sitting, with the young Prince of Wales and Princess Mary, and surrounded by dogs in a setting of unprecedented domesticity. The giant scale of the Great Peece must have been conceived as a visual riposte to Holbein’s forbidding Henry VIII and his family, also hanging at Whitehall. Of course, as so often with Charles I, image and reality were rarely the same.