Taste in high life

Hogarth, William, 1697-1764 · May 1, 1798

This print is satirizing the clothes and behavior of fashionable society in the early 1740s. On the left is a woman with her servant, a young boy she has dressed up in a feathered turban. The woman on the right is wearing a dress with a ludicrously full skirt. Her companion wears a long pigtail and is carrying a huge white fur muff. This couple are in a raptures over a teacup held by the woman, and its matching saucer, held by the man. A passion for collecting porcelain was widely seen as a foible of the wealthy.