Room 34: eighteenth-century England tells its own story

Why this room

Room 34 brings together British painting from the second half of the eighteenth century. The museum renamed it the "Blavatnik Family Foundation Room" in May 2025 to mark a sponsorship, but its number has not changed: it is still here, on Level 2, that you find Hogarth, Gainsborough, Stubbs, Reynolds and Raeburn.

What makes the room interesting is not any single artist's name, but the way these painters speak to one another. Hogarth tells a moralising fiction about money and marriage; Gainsborough paints a very real couple posing on their own land; Stubbs devotes an entire canvas to a horse, with no rider and no setting. Together, they paint the portrait of a society obsessed with rank, property and appearance — and confident enough in itself to be painted without flattery.

1. Marriage A-la-Mode: a serial drama in six acts

Hogarth did not paint this series on commission: he painted it betting that a collector would buy it once finished, around 1743. The six canvases, all the same size (69.9 × 90.8 cm), read like scenes from a play. In Marriage A-la-Mode, a penniless earl marries his son to the daughter of a wealthy City merchant to get his hands on her dowry: neither the son nor the daughter has any say in the matter. In the first painting, The Marriage Settlement, look for the detail that sums it all up: two hunting dogs chained to each other in the foreground, while the husband-to-be admires his own reflection in the mirror — a mirror in which it is in fact the face of the lawyer Silvertongue that appears, already leaning towards the bride-to-be.

What follows turns into farce, then into tragedy. In The Tête à Tête, the young couple return home exhausted, each from a night spent apart from the other. In The Inspection, the husband consults a quack doctor about a venereal disease. In The Toilette, the countess receives her visitors during her morning toilette, in imitation of French aristocratic levées; step closer to the statuette held by a young page — it depicts Actaeon turned into a stag, and the allusion to the cuckolded husband is not subtle.

Nor is the ending subtle. In The Bagnio, the husband catches his wife with Silvertongue in a bathhouse rented by the hour and dies stabbed. In The Lady's Death, the countess, learning of her lover's hanging, poisons herself with laudanum; a nurse brings her child to her one last time, marked by congenital syphilis, while the father slips the ring off her finger rather than comfort her. Hogarth sold the series during his lifetime, in 1751, to a first buyer; it changed hands again and went through two unsuccessful auctions before finally being sold on 10 February 1797 to the insurer John Julius Angerstein. On the latter's death, it entered the National Gallery in 1824 with the rest of his collection — a purchase that literally founded the museum, which opened that same year in Angerstein's former townhouse.

2. Whistlejacket: a horse larger than reason

Whistlejacket was born in 1749, raced without great distinction for his first owner, then was bought in 1756 by Charles Watson-Wentworth, 2nd Marquess of Rockingham, who kept a stable of 200 horses on his Wentworth Woodhouse estate in Yorkshire. The horse achieved his greatest victory at the age of ten, at York, in August 1759 — his last race before retirement. It was Rockingham who commissioned this almost life-size portrait from George Stubbs: the canvas measures 292 × 246.4 cm, and the horse is painted rearing, alone, with no rider and no landscape.

This empty background has given rise to legends: some claimed that Stubbs intended to add King George III as a rider, or that the horse, catching sight of its own image, reared up in fury at seeing it, forcing Rockingham to hang the unfinished canvas as it was. Art historians reject these stories — the shadows painted beneath the hooves show a fully finished painting, and Rockingham, a collector of antique sculpture, had already commissioned other horse portraits from Stubbs with equally bare backgrounds, most likely inspired by classical bas-reliefs. Step back as you enter the room: the canvas is calculated to fill the entire field of vision from just a few metres away.

The painting remained in Rockingham's family (he died childless in 1782, and it passed to his heirs, the Earls Fitzwilliam) until 1997, when the National Gallery bought it for £11 million, with support from the Heritage Lottery Fund. In spring 2026, the museum is displaying right alongside it Scrub, a bay horse belonging to the Marquess of Rockingham, another of Rockingham's horses painted by Stubbs the same year — a chance to compare the two canvases side by side.

3. Mr and Mrs Andrews: a couple and their land

Robert Andrews (1725-1806) married Frances Mary Carter (1732-1780) on 10 November 1748; he was 22, she was 16. Gainsborough painted the couple shortly after, around 1750, on an unusually wide and low canvas (69.8 × 119.4 cm) that leaves nearly half the painting to a landscape: that of their Auberies estate, near Sudbury, in Suffolk. Look towards the back of the canvas: the church tower visible between the trees is that of All Saints, where the Andrews were married.

Robert Andrews poses with a gun under his arm and a dog at his feet — the attributes of a landowner entitled to hunt on his own land, a privilege still reserved to a minority of landowners at the time. Look for the patch of unfinished fabric on Frances Andrews's blue dress, over her lap: art historians still debate what Gainsborough meant to paint there — a pheasant, a book, a piece of needlework — with no answer commanding consensus.

The painting remained in the Andrews family for more than two centuries, until a descendant, Gerald Willoughby Andrews, sold it at Sotheby's in 1960 for £130,000. The National Gallery acquired it thanks to an exceptional grant from the British Treasury, supplemented by the Pilgrim Trust, the Art Fund, the Associated Television company and private donors.

4. The Graham Children: a family portrait overtaken by grief

Daniel Graham, official apothecary to George I and then George II, commissioned this portrait of his four children from Hogarth in 1742. On the canvas (160.5 × 181 cm), the eldest, Henrietta, holds cherries, a brother turns the handle of a barrel organ, the youngest, Anna Maria, sketches a dance step — and a cat climbs up a chair to try to catch a caged goldfinch.

The detail that changes everything: the youngest of the children, Thomas, seated in a gilded child's carriage decorated with a bird, was already dead by the time Hogarth finished the painting. The crossed carnations placed near him are funeral flowers. Look, in the background, for the clock topped by a winged cupid holding a scythe: it shows 1:45pm, most likely the hour of the child's death. The cat threatening the bird, in a painting meant to celebrate the innocence of childhood, then takes on an entirely different meaning.

5. The Archers: two brothers, one bow, one light

Henry Raeburn painted the brothers Robert Ferguson of Raith and Ronald Ferguson around 1789-1790, then in their late teens — several years before they officially became members of the Royal Company of Archers, the Scottish royal company of archers, Robert in 1792 and Ronald in 1801. The painting (110.5 × 123.6 cm) rides on the era's enthusiasm for archery, then back in fashion as an aristocratic sport.

The composition rewards a closer look: Robert, in sharp profile, is lit from the front as he draws his bow, while Ronald, behind him, remains entirely in shadow and looks straight at the visitor, framed by the taut string of his brother's bow. The arrow, held horizontally, splits the canvas exactly in two. The National Gallery acquired the painting in 2000-2001 under the British scheme for accepting works of art in lieu of inheritance tax — a third way of entering the collection, different from the purchase of Whistlejacket or the publicly subscribed purchase of Mr and Mrs Andrews.

How much time

Allow a little under half an hour for this trail if you take the time to read Hogarth's six acts in order — it is the work that demands the most attention, precisely because it reads like a text.

Marriage A-la-Mode (the six paintings) — 15 minutes.
Whistlejacket — 5 minutes, stepping back to take in the scale.
Mr and Mrs Andrews — 5 minutes.
The Graham Children — 5 minutes.
The Archers — 3 minutes.

Sources and verification

All the dates, dimensions, provenance and anecdotes in this trail have been verified on nationalgallery.org.uk, on the official record for each work.

Displays and room openings can change. Check the National Gallery website on the day of your visit before following a route.

Listen to the commentary in the gallery

This route gives you a thread to follow. In front of an artwork, CulturAll adds the audio commentary: photograph the work or its label, listen, then ask your questions.