[…] so for example Harmen Otten portrayed himself standing while reading a moral contemplations book (Zedelijke bespiegelingen) close to his wife in a painting of the 1818, giving us a lively image of a modest Imperial style bourgeois interior (the artist, the wife, the small fat dog create a perfect scalene triangle): the birthdates and the wedding date of the two are framed.

Translation of M. PRAZ, Scene di Conversazione, Roma 1971, p. 175.