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The four Angerstein children were the grandchildren of a Russo-British banker, John Julius Angerstein (1765-1823), a co-founder of Lloyd's of London and financial adviser to William Pitt.
A frayed red-velvet curtain makes it clear that the children are posing for a fancy tableau vivant. Like an infant Hercules, the littlest Angerstein, guided by his sister, wields a spade. Picturesque in tattered velvets, holding a broom, the boy to the far right recalls those poor children painted by Murillo, whose works were among the most popular pictures of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, once they had been brought to the rest of Europe during the Napoleonic wars.
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