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Meninsky's 'Family Group' is painted in the monumental 'Miltonic style' that he began to employ in the 1930s, in which the artist envisioned an idealised, generalised, pastoral setting peopled by monumental figures, the best-known of which are his illustrations to Milton's poems 'L'Allegro' and 'Il Penseroso' (published 1946).

After the outbreak of the Second World War, Meninsky had to move to Oxford to take up a position at the Oxford City School of Art. Many paintings, drawings and lithographs in the Miltonic style resulted from this period, influenced by Picasso but also Samuel Palmer, who inspired a new generation of 'neo-romantics' in the 1940s. Meninsky had been drawn to the mother and child image since the birth of his two sons, David, in 1918, and Philip, in 1919, and his first solo exhibition in 1919 at the Goupil Gallery, London, was entitled 'Mother and Child Drawings'.