This oil sketch by Joseph Highmore (1692–1780) depicts A Family Group in Van Dyck costume.

Sometimes a painting catches the imagination as much for its provenance as for its artistic merits, and this oil sketch is very much a case in point. For over a century it was believed to be the work of William Hogarth, first published as such in Samuel Ireland's Graphic Illustrations of Hogarth (1794–99). Highmore is one of the most engaging artists of the first Hanoverian period, and yet so obscure had he become by the nineteenth century that even some of his most elaborate paintings had been reattributed to Hogarth – for example The Angel of Mercy, c.1746, now at the Yale Center for British Art. It was not correctly identified as by Joseph Highmore until 1969, in Ralph Edwards's article 'Hogarth into Highmore, or a Wrong Redressed' in Apollo magazine.

The painting was subsequently owned by Major Edward Croft-Murray, CBE, author of the standard reference Decorative Painting in England 1537–1837.

Collectors of eighteenth-century British painting, Highmore/Hogarth attribution history, and works with a documented reattribution story will find this a genuinely fascinating example connecting two of Georgian Britain's most significant painters.