''The Assembly at Wanstead House'' is a c. 1728–1732 group portrait painting by the English artist
William Hogarth. It is now in the collection of the
Philadelphia Museum of Art
The Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMoA) is an art museum originally chartered in 1876 for the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. The main museum building was completed in 1928 on Fairmount, a hill located at the northwest end of the Benjamin Fr ...
in
Philadelphia
Philadelphia, often called Philly, is the largest city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the sixth-largest city in the U.S., the second-largest city in both the Northeast megalopolis and Mid-Atlantic regions after New York City. Sinc ...
,
Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania (; ( Pennsylvania Dutch: )), officially the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, is a state spanning the Mid-Atlantic, Northeastern, Appalachian, and Great Lakes regions of the United States. It borders Delaware to its southeast, ...
.
Description
The painting is believed to have been commissioned to record the 25th wedding anniversary of
Richard Child, Viscount Castlemain and his wife Dorothy Glynne Child.
Philadelphia Museum of Art: Catalogue Entry
/ref>
It shows the Viscount in the Long Ballroom of his newly built Wanstead House, seated at an ornate tea-table with his two eldest daughters at far right foreground, wearing a red coat. His wife, ostensibly the central figure of the painting, suddenly turns away from her card game pointing towards him her card the ace of spades, an allusion to her guests and to the viewer that her husband was her winning card; thus does Hogarth bring his patron, the apparently compositionally modestly placed peer into centre-stage. The younger three children form a group in the left foreground.
See also
* List of works by William Hogarth
References
External links
*http://www.philamuseum.org/collections/permanent/103800.html
{{DEFAULTSORT:Assembly at Wanstead House, The
1720s paintings
1730s paintings
Paintings by William Hogarth
18th-century portraits
Group portraits by English artists
Paintings in the Philadelphia Museum of Art
London in art