Rustic Happiness, or Father and Child, 1828 (oil on panel)

A young man shows his child the pictures in a family Bible while a woman looks out at the setting sun over the countryside beyond. Peaceful, idealised rural life, contentment in poverty, are gentle, recurring themes in Mulready's intimate paintings in the Dutch manner. He often enlisted his family to sit for him - by this date, having separated from his wife, his four sons with her grown up, he was living with his 'housekeeper', a Mrs. Leckie, and surrounded by children of complicated parentage. Mulready used thin glazes on a panels to create a luminous effect, warm and vibrant; when the author Thackeray saw it, he wrote: 'There is a little Mulready, of which the colour blazes out like sapphires and rubies...'