A Midnight Modern Conversation
after William Hogarth (London 1697 - London 1764)
Category
Art / Oil paintings
Date
1733 (after)
Materials
Oil on canvas
Measurements
1320 x 1455 mm
Place of origin
England
Order this imageCollection
Petworth House and Park, West Sussex
NT 485042
Caption
This picture is derived from Hogarth’s engraving, published in 1733, rather than the original painting of around 1730/1, now in the Yale Centre for British Art. It is a satire on the varying effects of drink. Horace Walpole noted that this was the first work that showed Hogarth’s command of character. Of all his works, this has been the most generally popular on the Continent, particularly in Germany, where copies of it have been multiplied ad infinitum. It is probable that most of the figures in the picture were portraits.
Summary
Oil painting on canvas, A Midnight Modern Conversation, after William Hogarth (London 1697 - London 1764), after a lost original engraved in 1733. Eleven drunken figures round a table, one on the floor, centre, in scarlet and a parson is mixing punch; there are three hats on the walls and wicker wine flasks and lemon peel in the left-hand corner. Sir John Hawkins is identified as the rosy-gilled parson who presides over the capacious bowl of punch as Orator Henley, but Mrs Piozzi, as the Reverernd Cornelius Ford, a cousin of Dr Johnson, who described him as a 'man of great parts, very profligate, but I never heard he was impious.' The figure on his left, seated at the table, is Counsellor Kettleby, a vociferous bar-orator, remarkable, though an utter barrister, for wearing a full-bottomed wig, which he is here drawn with, as also for a horrible squint. This is a repetition of a 1734 picture.
Provenance
In the 1835 catalogue of Henry Wyndham Phillips (1820 - 1868). By descent to the current Lord Egremont. On loan from the Egremont Private Collection
Credit line
Petworth House, The Egremont Collection
Makers and roles
after William Hogarth (London 1697 - London 1764), artist