A curricle and grooms on a road in an extensive landscape

This is one of the earliest paintings of a curricle, the only two wheeled vehicle built to take a pair of horses. It was believed to have originated in Italy but English coachbuilders altered the shape by giving the back panel an ogee curve. Sponsored by the Prince of Wales in the late 1790s it took over from the unstable Phaeton as the fashionable vehicle and remained so well into the 19th Century when it was superseeded by the cabriolet.

It has previously been suggested that the coat-of-arms on the carriage bears the crest of the Bacon family imposed by a shield of the Nightingale family, however this appears unlikely.