#ornate table

Collection: Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp, Belgium

Three sisters – Elizabeth, Diana and Mary – are playing cards. The game and the work’s title hint at competition over who would marry first, presenting courtship as a game that these women are learning to play. This was seen as important for woman at the time. Writer and art collector Walter Armstrong commissioned John Everett Millais to paint this portrait of his daughters. He hoped the painting would help to raise the social profile of his family. Millais borrowed the title and the composition from a popular photograph of the day.

Duchess Helene of Mecklenburg-Schwerin (1814 – 1858) was a French Crown Princess after her marriage in 1837 to the eldest son of Louis Philippe I. She is known as the mother of the future Count of Paris and Duke of Chartres.

Before his election, he fought in the French and Indian War, commanded troops to victory in the Revolutionary War, and presided over the Constitutional Convention. As president, he installed the Supreme Court, proclaimed neutrality in the war between Britain and France, and suppressed the tax protest known as the Whiskey Rebellion. After serving two terms, Washington declined to run again. In his farewell address, he told the nation, “The name of AMERICAN, which belongs to you in your national capacity, must always exalt the just pride of patriotism.”

This portrait shows the Duchess of Orleans in full dress: Her ivory satin robe has a plunging neckline and the ankle-length skirt is lined with floral-patterned Brussels lace as her the satin shoes peak out the bottom. Her hair is styled in a headband below a lace headdress finished with blue satin ribbons.

Collection: The Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts, United States

The subject of the painting is taken from Keats's well known poem Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil, which in turn borrows its theme from Boccaccio's Decameron. Set in medieval Florence, the story tells how Isabella falls in love with Lorenzo, an employee in her brothers' business. Having hoped she would make a profitable marriage, the brothers are angry and murder Lorenzo, burying his body in the forest and telling Isabella that he has been sent away on urgent affairs. When Lorenzo's ghost appears to Isabella and reveals his true fate, she exhumes the body and cuts of his head, concealing it in a pot beneath a basil plant which she waters with her tears. Eventually the brothers discover and steal it, and Isabella dies of a broken heart.

Gustav III (1746 – 1792), also called Gustavus III, was King of Sweden from 1771 until his assassination in 1792.