“The interior of a room showing no trace of actual poverty. The invalid, a man, fully dressed but wearing a nightcap, sits in an upholstered arm-chair by the fire. A little girl stands at his knee; at his side on a tray or table are two bowls and a medicine bottle labelled ‘as before’. The physician, a well-dressed man wearing a bag-wig, is about to leave the room (right); he puts coins into the hand of a young woman holding an infant. The room is papered, a half-tester bed with curtains stands against the wall. Tea-things are ranged along the chimney-piece, over which is a framed picture of a Christ healing the blind man.”–British Museum online catalogue
- Title: The benevolent physician
- Published: London, 9 November 1782
782.11.09.02+
Acquired July 2024
A coach pulling up to the Post Station, the Cock Inn at left, on route to Brighton. The coach is pulling into the court yard, about to pass under a wooden gate bearing the inn’s sign, while another coach stands at the inn door. People look down from the second story windows. A man waits at the mile marker in front of another building at right. In the foreground to left, a man with a wooden leg carries a small child on his back as he leads a donkey that carries a woman and two children, one of whom appears to be nursing, the other in a basket that hangs over the donkey. Their dog follows behind.
Copy (reversed) of the first state of Plate 7 of Hogarth’s ‘The Rake’s Progress’ (Paulson 138): A room in the Fleet Prison (after the painting at Sir John Soane’s Museum); Tom sits at a table, to right, on which is a rejection letter from John Rich to whom he has submitted a play; his wife clenches her fists, the gaoler asks for garnish money and a boy asks payment for a tankard of ale; to left, Sarah Young has fainted and is being administered smelling salts by one woman while another slaps her hand, her child clings to her skirt; she is supported by an older man with a beard who has dropped a sheet containing a scheme for paying the national debt (a reference to such a scheme put forward by Hogarth’s father); in the background an alchemist works at a forge.”–British Museum online catalogue.
An ugly woman with only two teeth and with holes in her sleeve, shown half-length to left, a scarf over her head and tied under her chin, one hand around a tankard, holding up the other hand with thumb and forefinger pinched together, a small round snuff box on the table.