The Holy Family

Michael Dahl was a Swedish-born painter who spent most of his career in England, where he became one of the leading portrait painters of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, a serious rival to Sir Godfrey Kneller. His 1691 Holy Family is an unusual deviation from his primarily portraiture practice, suggesting either a private devotional commission or an exploratory work in a different genre. Dahl had travelled in France and Italy in the 1680s, where he would have encountered the full range of Baroque religious painting, and this work likely reflects those experiences.

The Holy Family composition follows Baroque conventions for the subject — soft lighting, the Virgin cradling the infant with Joseph in attendance. Dahl's portrait training shows in the individuated facial types; the colour, warmed by Italian and French influence, differs from his cooler English portrait palette.