When Anthony van Dyck painted Portrait of Philip Herbert, 4th Earl of Pembroke, his second wife Lady Anne Clifford, 14th Baroness of Clifford and his surviving children by his first marriage and Lady Mary Villiers in 1635, he was at the height of his fame as court painter to Charles I. The portrait united two of England’s most influential families at a moment of both personal and political significance: Anne Clifford, an indomitable heiress and diarist, had only recently married Pembroke, whose loyalty to the king was under scrutiny as tensions mounted before the English Civil War. This painting stands as a rare family record, capturing the complex alliances and ambitions of the English aristocracy on the eve of national upheaval. Van Dyck chooses not a formal group, but a living tableau: Anne Clifford stands with quiet authority beside her husband, who gestures protectively toward his children from his first marriage.

The children’s arrangement—clustered by age and gender, with Lady Mary Villiers included—signals the blended nature of this new household. The silks and pearls worn by the sitters are more than decoration: they speak of lineage, status, and the careful management of appearances. Van Dyck’s luminous handling of flesh and fabric, and his ability to suggest both intimacy and hierarchy, set this apart from earlier English portraits, such as those by Daniel Mytens, whose compositions feel more rigid and less psychologically nuanced. The painting’s early history is not fully documented, but it was almost certainly commissioned by the Pembroke family for their ancestral seat at Wilton House, where Van Dyck executed several other portraits.

Over the centuries, the work has passed quietly through inheritance, surviving the dispersals and sales that scattered so many English family collections. Its attribution to Van Dyck has never been seriously questioned, thanks to the painter’s unmistakable brushwork and the prominence of the sitters. Today, the portrait stands as a testament to Van Dyck’s transformative impact on British portraiture, capturing not just likeness but the shifting fortunes of his subjects.