The sitters are Sir Robert (1631--1688) and his wife Mary (née Whitchurch; d. 1674), the wealthy widow of Sir Thomas Hyde, whom he married in 1665; Bridget Hyde (1662-1734), Lady Vyner's daughter by her first marriage; and Charles Vyner (1666-88), their only son. The family is shown in the garden of their house, Swakeleys, in Middlesex, which according to Samuel Pepys was 'a place not very moderne in the gardens nor the house, but the most uniforme in all that I ever saw - and some things to excess'. (http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw08291/The-Family-of-Sir-Robert-Vyner#description) "I adore family portraits, the suave and the crude. I love how they tell us so much about the individual personalities and about the group dynamic. Or they don't; how many false narratives are memorialized in these spare or crowded compositions? And how is character - false or genuine - revealed? Are we more likely to find the truth in the work of a very accomplished artist, the one whose technique is completely secure, who has the ability to capture a likeness, to accurately describe space and surfaces? Or should we put more faith in the naïve or less skilled painter, whose real struggle just to get things right, might diminish the likelihood of gross flattery or any calculated revision of the way the family members relate to each other? With old portraits we rarely know much if anything about the true story of these family relationships. But it's "story" and "relationship" that come down to us, anyway. Whether truth or obfuscation, the stories of these nonetheless real people continue to play out, to reach out to us. In paint and in two dimensions." (http://godsandfoolishgrandeur.blogspot.nl/2016/12/random-families-random-family-portraits.html)