William Hogarth helped popularize the small-scale conversation piece in the early 1730s, taking the conventions of full-scale aristocratic group portraiture and making them suitable to patrons from the gentry and middling ranks. Here, the London barrister John Jeffreys is shown in a landscape park with his wife, Elizabeth, and their four young children. The setting is almost certainly imaginary, and the family is portrayed as prosperous and genteel, at ease with each other and in nature. Hogarth shows the Jeffreys family, as members of the new professional class, enjoying leisure time and using it to cultivate knowledge, both from books and from close exploration of the natural world. Gallery label for installation of YCBA collection, 2016
