The beggar's opera
Hogarth, William (1697-1764)
- Yale Center for British Art
Paul Mellon Collection[Museum inv. no.: B1981.25.349]
Item location
Description
Curatorial comments from museum website:John Gay’s ballad opera, with music arranged by Johann Pepusch, was first produced by John Rich at the Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre in January 1728. “The Beggar’s Opera” was an unprecedented success, running for sixty-two performances in its first season and inspiring the pun that it had made Rich gay, and Gay rich. With its English ballad interludes and its setting in London's criminal underworld, the play challenged the vogue for Italian opera that Hogarth had satirized in his earliest engravings. Hogarth’s painting depicts the climax of the play, set in Newgate Prison. Macheath, a gentlemanly highwayman bigamist, stands in chains at center stage. His two wives, Polly Peachum and Lucy Lockit, make appeals to their fathers, thieftaker and jailer, respectively, to perjure themselves in support of Macheath. Hogarth painted five versions of the scene; this is the last and marks the culmination of his rapid development as a painter. The painting is set in an ambiguous space, part prison and part stage, which situates the interplay of reality and fiction suggested in the Latin motto that appears on the banner over the stage: “Veluti in speculum” (as in a mirror). The figures seated in boxes at the sides of the stage, occupying what were considered to be the best seats in the house, are recognizable portraits. Of particular note are John Gay, the shadowy figure at the foot of the staircase, and John Rich, standing immediately in front of Gay. In the foreground, Lavinia Fenton, the actress playing Polly Peachum, meets the gaze of the enthralled Lord Bolton; at the end of the season he would install her as his mistress, and they would remain together until his death in 1754. “The Beggar's Opera” was Hogarth’s first major success as a painter and set the stage thematically and compositionally for the modern moral subjects he would begin to produce in the following decade.
--Eleanor Hughes,2007-01
People as subjects
Gay, John (1685-1732)Fenton, Lavinia (1708-1760)
Rich, John (1692-1761)
Iconclass
48C85(+383)theatre, theatrical performance ( + opera)
48C862(+372)
opera ( + performance ~ music)
48C755
vocal music, singing
48C78(+382)
listening to music ( + theatre)
Musical works
Pepusch, John Christopher -- Beggar's operaRIdIM images
