Going to see Ibsen's intense late drama Rosmersholm at London's Almeida Theatre recently, I was struck by two aspects of the play I hadn't fully appreciated when studying it for A-level English. The first was Ibsen's boldness in tackling the subject of incestuous abuse at a time when Freud himself was still a young neurologist - and implicitly going further than the father of psychoanalysis (a fan of Rosmersholm) who, notoriously, pulled back from his earlier position of accusing the bons bourgeois of Vienna of seducing their daughters.

The second was the importance in the play of family tradition, represented by rows of family portraits which, Ibsen's stage directions insist, should lour down on the modern-day inhabitants of Rosmersholm, the family home of the Rosmers.

The designer Hildegard Bechtler has played down the scale of these portraits, which works beautifully in creating a set that could have been painted by that Danish master of cool interiority Vilhelm Hammershoi, but takes away from the weight of meaning that family tradition has in the play. Johannes Rosmer, the idealistic clergyman hero, believes he can break free from his ancestry, the generations of Rosmer dignitaries who were, according to your view of things, either pillars of the community or oppressors of the poor. But, too late, he realises that it is only his family name that gives him standing in the small-minded local society, as he is fought over by rival political factions, led by a reactionary schoolmaster and a leftwing tabloid journalist, each eager to give himself the Rosmer seal of approval.

The past catches up with the present in all sorts of ways in Rosmersholm, blighting possibilities of love and idealism, and the ending is a tragic "Liebestod" without any of the transcendent ecstasy of Wagner's Tristan and Isolde. But I don't think Ibsen's intention was to vindicate the framed gallery of self-satisfied worthies on the walls of Rosmersholm. Any victory the family portraits achieve is pyrrhic, since Johannes Rosmer dies childless.

More than a century has passed since Ibsen wrote Rosmersholm and Freud came up with his shocking theories about the origins of malaise in the psyche. Victorian dignitaries no longer have the power to influence and inhibit us. Lytton Strachey debunked them long ago, in Eminent Victorians; revisionist reappraisal is no longer news. So, if I put in a positive word for family portraits, I don't mean to challenge the healthy iconoclasm of Ibsen and Freud but am simply musing on my own family history.

All my life I have been coolly appraised by two family portraits, painted in the late 18th century by the English pastellist John Russell. George Bolton Eyres and his formidable wife have looked down from the walls, he dressed in his East India army uniform, with a palm tree over his shoulder, she rather snooty, with long gloves and an elegant country house in the background. I used to find them overbearing, full of social airs and self-importance.

Now I am much more intrigued by them. George Bolton Eyres, the only member of my family who ever made any money, was obviously a shrewd operator. The lavish encomium on his memorial stone in Bath Abbey ("Merely to enumerate the several virtues of this excellent man" etc, etc) tells only part of the story. As a young man he was briefly dismissed from the company for engaging in a spot of private copper trading; who knows what he got up to in India? (He ended up as a major-general in the East India army.) Merely to survive there in the mid-18th century was quite an achievement. Of course, the kind of Jane Austen life they aspired to and set up was based on what we would now call exploitation; but, boy, must it have taken energy and determination to accomplish.

George Bolton's descendants tended to be more academic and less shrewd; his son, who bought quantities of wine from Berry Bros in London's St James's Street, lost his father's fortune standing surety for a friend's debt. His great-grandson (my great-grandfather) became the British minister in Albania in the 1920s, furthering the cause of King Zog, and no doubt contributing inadvertently to the problems that have bedevilled the Balkans ever since.

My purpose, however, was not to dwell on my family history in particular but to reflect on the way a family background influences an individual. Suddenly I am realising that I have a certain pride in my ancestors, that they served with some distinction and courage for two centuries in the armed forces, the diplomatic service, as Cambridge academics. And though this pride could become a ludicrous vanity, it might also have a beneficial effect: to make me want to live up to their achievement, not by working in the same fields but by doing something with distinction.

I believe Johannes Rosmer was wrong to try to reject his ancestors so absolutely. No doubt they were a mixed bunch but some of their determination and pride had passed down to him. Paradoxically, his admirable belief that he could lead the community in a fresh direction, away from the sins or accommodations associated with the old oppressive Rosmers, stemmed in part from them.

harry.eyres@ft.com

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