Harvey Filister and Ted Bair are art collectors and friends of artist Paul Oxborough. His double portrait of them, posed affectionately and informally, celebrates their relationship and their recent marriage. The painting also serves as an example of Oxborough’s study of academic portraiture and the Old Masters. For at least fifteen years, Oxborough has painted in this mode, referencing artists from the past such as John Singer Sargent while bringing the traditions of the nineteenth century firmly into the twenty-first. Critics often comment on his devotion to the evocation of light, which is evident here in the play of daylight and shadow across the horizontal composition and the faces of his subjects.