The precise identity of the children in the portrait is unknown. They are members of the Wauchope family, whose portraits came to Doddington via the marriage in 1906 of Helen Constance Hunter Blair (DN40), daughter of Elizabeth Wauchope, to Charles Francis Cracroft Jarvis. There is a family tradition that the two boys featured in the portrait were the inspiration for The Children of the New Forest, Captain Frederick Marryat’s popular novel of 1847. It has been suggested that the artist may be the amateur, Barbara Anderson, of Moredun, near Edinburgh.