The Beggar’s Opera

John Gay’s ballad opera opened at the Theatre Royal, Lincoln’s Inn Fields on 29 January 1728 and took London by storm, and Hogarth’s response to the play gave the young painter his first major success. He treated the subject five times over the following years; this canvas, signed and dated 1729, is the last of those versions, and the museum notes that it prepared the way, thematically and compositionally, for the modern moral subjects he began in the decade that followed. The picture was long catalogued under descriptive titles such as The Beggar’s Opera, III, xi and Scene from the Beggar’s Opera, and the museum’s label records that the singer who created the part of Polly Peachum, Lavinia Fenton, became the mistress of a peer seated in one of the stage boxes during the opera’s first run. It belongs to the Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.