The Wedding of Stephen Beckingham and Mary Cox

The inscription in the lower left corner gives the date, the 9th of June 1729. That was the day Stephen Beckingham, a young barrister at Lincoln's Inn, married Mary Cox at the small London church of St Benet, Paul's Wharf, near St Paul's Cathedral. Hogarth did not paint that church. He placed the couple in a grander interior based on the apse of St Martin-in-the-Fields, which had been consecrated only three years earlier. Weddings were private affairs in 18th-century England and hardly anyone painted them, so this was new ground for Hogarth, then 31 and still known mainly as an engraver, trying his hand at the fashionable small group portrait called the conversation piece. That same spring he had married in secret himself, eloping with Jane, the daughter of the painter Sir James Thornhill. X-rays show him changing the scene as he went. A figure arranging kneeling cushions at the lower left was scraped out, and the patterned Turkey carpet in the foreground was added.