Le Goût de la haute société

This was painted to settle a score. Mary Edwards was one of the richest women in England, unmarried by choice after ditching a spendthrift husband, and fashionable London laughed at her plain clothes and blunt manners. So around 1742 she paid Hogarth 60 guineas to mock the people who had mocked her. The picture is a room of the overdressed: a woman fingering the chin of a small turbaned page, a monkey in a coat and cuffs solemnly reading a list of auction purchases, and a vast whalebone hoop skirt labelled the very height of the mode. Hogarth would soon turn the same sharp eye on fashionable marriage in his famous series. This one stayed a private joke, and he was never fond of work made to order.