A fashionably dressed woman sitting behind a table is taking a necklace out of a box. She looks with disdain at her enraged husband in old-fashioned clothes and a nightcap, sitting next to her, his fists clenched and despair on his face. In his lap lies a pair of breeches he is sewing; above on the wall of their meagre abode hangs a small stag’s head with antlers.
- Printmaker: Wilson, James, approximately 1735-approximately 1786, printmaker.
- Title: A city taylor’s wife dressing for the Pantheon [graphic] / Martin pinxt. ; Wilson sculp.
- Publication: [London] : Publish’d 5th Feby. 1772 by Heny. Parker at No. 82 in Cornhill, London, [5 February 1772]
772.02.05.02.1+
January 2020
Copy (not reversed) of the first state of Plate 2 of Hogarth’s ‘The Rake’s Progress’ (Paulson 133): a fashionable interior with Tom, in elegant indoor dress, surrounded by tradesmen vying for his custom: a poet, a wigmaker, a tailor, a musician (with a list of presents given by aristocrats to the popular castrato, Farinelli), a fencing master (said to be named Dubois), a prizefighter with quarter-staffs (said to be James Figg), a dancing master (John Essex?), a landscape-gardener (said to be Charles Bridgeman), a bodyguard, a huntsman and a jockey.–British Museum online catalogue.
A tailor and cobbler, both are partially bald, are seated with their backs to roaring fire in the grate of a fireplace. The cobbler is sitting at a table with a glass and tankard in front of him; he is smoking a pipe and blowing the smoke into the tailor’s face. The tailor sits slumped forward in a state of evident inebriation and his own pipe lies broken on the floor. On the wall behind them is a picture of a man seated under a tree sketching(?) the rural scene in front of him, a church with a steeple in the distance.