La familia Strode

In the 1730s wealthy London families wanted a new kind of portrait, smaller and relaxed, showing them at ease in their own rooms rather than posed in grand robes. Hogarth made his early name on exactly these conversation pieces, and here he seats the merchant William Strode with his new wife, Lady Anne Cecil, over tea. The two men deep in talk are a relative, Colonel Strode, and Strode's old tutor Dr Arthur Smyth, who would later become Archbishop of Dublin. A servant pours at the side, and the dogs have their own quarrel on the floor. The pictures crowded on the wall behind them are a quiet boast. The Strodes had recently done the fashionable tour of Italy, and they wanted you to know it.