[2] The painting was inspired by an essay written by James Anthony Froude on England's Forgotten Worthies, which described the lives of Elizabethan seafarers.

The then Prime Minister John Major and Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd, who had recently pushed the Maastricht Treaty through Parliament against the wishes of many Conservatives, were shown as small boys in Elizabethan costume, listening as an old sailor (Sir Edward Heath) gestured towards the coast labelled "Europe" visible on the other side of the water.

Former Prime Minister Heath—whose hobby had been yachting—had taken Britain into the EEC (as it was then called) during his premiership, and had grown up in Kent where the coast of France is visible on a clear day.

At the time Heath was Father of the House of Commons and enjoying something of an Indian Summer after the ousting of his political nemesis, the eurosceptic Margaret Thatcher, as Prime Minister in 1990.

The picture has also appeared in recent explorations of postcolonialism, most notably Salman Rushdie's novel Midnight's Children, in which the narrator Saleem Sinai partly misremembers and transforms the meaning of the painting, a copy of which hung on his bedroom wall when he was a child.