The Family of George II

This 1731 painting of the Family of George II is one of Hogarth's most ambitious early group portraits, depicting the royal family in a conversation piece format. The commission represented significant recognition but also revealed the tensions between Hogarth's naturalistic approach and the demands of court imagery. William Hogarth, the most original British painter of the eighteenth century, combined the traditions of Flemish and Dutch genre painting with a specifically English tradition of social observation and moral satire to create a body of work unlike anything previously produced in British art. His portraits — frank, specific, unflattering in their psychological directness — belong to a tradition of honest observation that owed more to Rembrandt than to the idealized English portrait convention of his time. His invention of the narrative painting series — paintings designed to be read together, telling a moral story across multiple images — was a contribution to European art that has no precedent and established the tradition of British narrative painting that would culminate in Victorian genre art.

The royal group portrait balances formal grandeur with the informal animation that characterized Hogarth's approach to the conversation piece, creating a lively if unconventional royal image.