The Snyders Family (after Anthony van Dyck)

Collins copies a family portrait by Anthony van Dyck of the Flemish painter Frans Snyders and his wife in this work from around 1818 at the Canterbury Museums and Galleries. Copying Old Masters was standard practice for British painters, serving both as technical education and as a way of producing saleable works. Collins's choice of Van Dyck—the great Flemish portraitist who had worked at the English court—reflects the reverence for Van Dyck in British artistic culture.

The copy translates Van Dyck's aristocratic portrait style through Collins's own more modest technique. While necessarily following the original composition, Collins's handling inevitably reflects his own time's conventions of brushwork and color. The exercise of copying allowed him to study Van Dyck's approach to drapery, flesh, and compositional grandeur.