“MY daughters get bored by being told they resemble Irma and Lisch,” says Hugh Buchanan. “They’re more into grunge rock than their ancestors.” The portrait of the two young girls in Bavarian dress, painted in 1869 by Lind Alief, hangs in the Scottish home of the painter Hugh Buchanan and his wife Ann. Irma, 7, and Lisch, 5, were the daughters of Frans von Hardtmuth, the bohemian industrialist and inventor of the famous Koh-I-Noor pencil. Lily, 14, and Christian, 11, are their great-great-great nieces.

Irma and Lisch were aunts of Maria de Rohan, Ann Buchanan’s grandmother. Maria brought the picture to England after the Second World War. Hugh says: “It’s a wonderful picture — very touching, very sad. It exactly characterises the way girls feel when they are made to sit. Recently I commissioned a portrait of Lily and Christian and they look just as cross and bored as Irma and Lisch.”

THE SAME EXPRESSION

The brothers Ratcliffe; the brothers Savile

“THE similarity of our ten-year-old son Oscar to the painting of his great-great-great uncle Albany Bourchier Savile has often been remarked on. They have the same inquisitive and fascinated expression, although Oscar doesn’t look particularly like anyone else in the family,” says Sophie Ratcliffe, his mother. “I have known the painting since I was a teenager, when it was inherited by my parents from an aunt.”

John Yerburgh, Sophie’s father, adds: “The Savile boys’ father — also Albany — was at one stage a friend of John Constable and the family was going to be painted by him, but they fell out badly over the fee. So Mr Savile turned to Masquerier, and the painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1819.

His younger brother in the portrait, Bourchier Wrey Savile, had nine children but Albany had none. We are descended from another brother, Henry.”

THEY COULD BE SISTERS: AN ARTIST AND HER GREAT-GREAT-GREAT-GRANDMOTHER

Chiara de Cabarrus and Lady Mary Craven

Chiara de Cabarrus’s resemblance to the 1858 portrait of Lady Mary Craven is so uncanny that her mother Lady Caroline (daughter of the 10th Duke of Northumberland) confesses to shivering when she passes the painting.

Chiara, 29, is the great-great-great-granddaughter of Lady Mary and is training to be a portrait painter. “I always thought that my dark looks came from my father, who is half-Spanish, half-French,” she says, “so it’s odd to resemble someone on the English side of the family. She looks cheerful by nature, which I am. The difference is that I have a much squarer jaw.”

The portrait of Lady Mary as a dashing, poised young woman was painted by E. U. Eddis, a year after she married William George Craven, a grandson of the 1st Earl Craven. She is said to have later eloped with her lover to Paris. The portrait is on public view in the bedroom corridor of the recently opened top floor of Syon House. “I think it’s well-painted,” says Chiara, “but it’s not in a style I consciously seek to imitate, even though I work in the naturalist tradition. It’s very smooth and polished without much interesting brushwork.”

Interviews and photographs (used in newsprint version only) extracted from the March 4 edition of Country Life, on sale now

TRACE YOUR ANCESTORS

• British Society of Genealogists website www.sog.org.uk; also try www.familysearch.org
• Birth, marriage and death certificate indexes, England and Wales, from 1837 are at the Family Record Centre (FRC) in London, as are census returns 1841-91 and from 1901.
• www.1827online.com is a pay as you use facility, www.freebmd.rootsweb.com is free. Parish registers from the 16th century are in county record offices and local history libraries.