The Thistlethwayte Family

Thomas Hudson, 1707–1779

ca. 1758

Oil on canvas

Yale Center for British Art

A formal group portrait depicts a man standing on the left and three women and two children seated or standing to his right, set against a landscape background. A few years after Thomas Hudson’s death, the connoisseur and author Horace Walpole gently mocked the artist’s portraits and conversation pieces as “country gentlemen . . . content with [their] honest similitudes, and with . . . fair tied wigs, blue velvet coats, and white satin waistcoats.” It is an apt summary of Hudson’s unpretentious style that was tailored to his often unsophisticated clientele. Walpole might easily have been describing a gentleman like Alexander Thistlethwayte of Southwick Park in Hampshire, who poses in this nearly life-size conversation piece with his wife, Sarah, and their daughters, Catherine and Anne. If h