TASTE IN HIGH LIFE.
The picture from which this print was copied, Hogarth painted by the order of Miss Edwards, a woman of large fortune, who, having been laughed at for some singularities in her manners, requested the artist to recriminate on her opponents, and paid him sixty guineas for his production.
It is professedly intended to ridicule the reigning fashions of high life in the year 1742. To do this the painter has brought into one group an old beau and an old lady of the Chesterfield school, a fashionable young lady, a little black boy, and a full-dressed monkey. The old lady, with a most affected air, poises between her finger and thumb a small tea-cup, with the beauties of which she appears to be highly enamoured.
The gentleman, gazing with vacant wonder at that and the companion saucer which he holds in his hand, joins in admiration of its astonishing beauties!
"Each varied colour of the brightest hue,
The green, the red, the yellow, and the blue,
In every part their dazzled eyes behold,