Four Figures at a Table, by the Le Nain Brothers, c 1643

"It often seems the art of pre-modern Europe is a cavalcade of kings and queens and aristocrats. Yet in the age when Van Dyck was painting silk-clad cavaliers, Antoine, Louis and Mathieu Le Nain painted the French peasantry. This is a typically blunt and bleak example of their unvarnished records of real life. An older woman looks right at us, despairing, while a younger woman also casts us a melancholy glance. She is holding a plain ceramic water jug, to go with the dry bread the young boy in the picture is eating. Life’s no picnic for these country folk – it is an all but bare table. Dull brown light adds to the atmosphere of plainness and poverty. About 150 years before the French Revolution, the Le Nain Brothers reveal the injustice that sustained the brilliance of upper-class life."

National Gallery