The Dutch artists of the seventeenth century included here paint palatial interiors and gorgeous costumes. However, the forms of behaviour they describe differ depending upon ideas as to how a state and a family should be ordered.

The Stuart courts (nos. 1–3) are shown with ceremonial formality and a respect for degree. Merchants in the Dutch Republic on the other hand can be involved in much more boisterous and convivial gatherings (nos. 4 and 6). One English visitor to Holland in the 1650s complained that ‘in their families they are all equals and you have no way to know the Master and the Mistress but by taking them in bed together’.

During the next two hundred years something of this affectionate egalitarianism permeated family life elsewhere in Europe, including British royal families.