What Is Wrong with This Picture?

I noticed this curious painting in the National Gallery the other day. By the Le Nain brothers, French 17th-century genre painters, A Woman and Five Children is an unsettling image, full-frontal and crammed awkwardly into the picture space. The sitters stare out at us with unhappy, challenging expressions. And where is the woman's lower body? There's no room for it; surely she's out of scale. It is all very odd – and strangely reminiscent of Paula Rego.