Only the living room is unfriendly, mainly because of the glum ancestor portraits on the walls.

The sale of more than 1,490 lots will also offer porcelains, prints, genre paintings, ancestor portraits, folk art and furniture.

Two large ancestor portraits of a husband and wife painted in watercolour on silk date from the 18th century.

The paintings were "ancestor portraits."

With dog videos in the living room, dog magnets on the refrigerator and an ancestor portrait that is a soulful canine face, it's like a Goldilocks tale redone with Weimaraners.

One is being inaugurated with a show of Qing-dynasty Chinese ancestor portraits organized at the Freer and Arthur M. Sackler Galleries in Washington, where it appeared last summer.

The show's 64 ancestor portraits, trade signs, weather vanes, quilts, gypsum figures and decorated tin vessels, all produced over the last 200 years, reflect folk art's most important themes.

They put hunting prints and faux ancestor portraits on the walls, period furniture in the "study" (as the den came to be known), silver candlesticks on the mahogany dining-room table.

Related genres of commemorative art for the dead take many forms, such as the moai figures of Easter Island, apparently a type of sculpted ancestor portrait, though hardly individualized.

Wolff refers to the painting as a "generic ancestor portrait" whose subject's "knowing smirk" has often made him wish that she were in fact a relative.