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| The Wedding of Stephen Beckingham and Mary Cox |
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| Inscription and signature |
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| Detail of X-radiograph |
Artist:William Hogarth (British, London 1697–1764 London)
Date:1729
Medium:Oil on canvas
Dimensions:50 1/2 x 40 1/2 in. (128.3 x 102.9 cm)
Classification:Paintings
Credit Line:Marquand Fund, 1936
Accession Number:36.111
This wedding group is one of the artist's first essays in the fashionable genre of the conversation piece. Beckingham, a London lawyer, and his bride are flanked by members of their families. The marriage took place at St. Benet's but the setting is based on the church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields in Trafalgar Square. Although Hogarth was sought after for his ability to capture a likeness, the solemn event depicted here seems to have had limited appeal to him by comparison with his famous satirical subjects.
Catalogue Entry
As the contemporary inscription (see fig. 1 above) states, the painting shows the wedding of Stephen Beckingham on June 9, 1729. The groom, a barrister at Lincoln's Inn in London, married Mary Cox, daughter of a lawyer and businessman. The bride died prematurely in 1738 and Beckingham married Mary Catherine Corbett, eventually moving to Bourne Place, Kent, which came into his family through his second wife. Later a justice of the peace, he died at Bourne Place in 1756.
The marriage of Stephen Beckingham to Mary Cox took place at the parish church of St. Benet, Paul's Wharf, near St. Paul's Cathedral. The rector of St. Benet's was Thomas Cooke, who may have presided. The man at left must be the groom's father, while the man with the cane next to the officiant is the bride's father.[1] As Elizabeth Einberg suggested, he may have commissioned the picture. Although the ceremony took place at St. Benet's, the interior shown here is a modified view of the apse of the new church of St. Martin in the Fields, consecrated in 1726 and located on what is now Trafalgar Square. Weddings were not public occasions in the eighteenth century, and there was little precedent for depicting them. The painting, among the earliest of Hogarth's conversation pieces, came to light at the Royal Academy exhibition of 1894.
The penetrating observation and the satirical strain that characterize Hogarth's work as a printmaker are visible in the fat face and heavy body of the clergyman with his academic hood and, to a lesser extent, in the impassive gentleman with both hands propped on his walking stick and the attendant depicted in profile. Elizabeth Einberg (1987) had suggested that the church interior may have been painted by someone practiced in painting architecture, such as an assistant in the studio of Hogarth's father in law, Sir James Thornhill. However, while some of the portraits are more fully worked up than the background, they are smoothly integrated technically, and there is no indication in the X-radiograph (fig. 2) of a difference in handling. In the foreground, at the lower left, Hogarth introduced and then scraped out a figure arranging hassocks. He also painted out a second red velvet cushion on the top step and added an elaborate Turkey carpet at the front and to the right. Despite the changes, the painting is well preserved and almost entirely free of restoration.
Katharine Baetjer 2017
[1] Einberg 2016, p. 49, has identified the three ladies as the groom's unmarried sisters, Sarah, Anne, and Susanna.
Copyright Image
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