Les Domestiques de Hogarth

Domestic servants in the 18th century were painted, if at all, as background props in someone else's portrait. Hogarth did the opposite here. He crowded six of his own household staff onto one canvas, three men and three women, from a boy to an older man, each studied as carefully as any paying sitter would be. Nobody commissioned this. He seems to have made it for himself and kept it in his studio, partly to show visiting patrons what he could do with a face. If you look at the lower left you can see he had blocked out room for a seventh head and never finished it, and the canvas was later trimmed down to the six heads he did complete.