Object Type
This print by William Hogarth is an etching. The action of acid was used to make a pattern of grooves on a copper printing plate. This image on the printing plate was the reverse of the final image. The grooves were then filled with ink and the image was transferred onto a blank sheet of paper.

Subject Depicted
William Hogarth (1697-1754) is satirising the clothes and behaviour of fashionable society in the early 1740s. On the left is a woman with her servant, a young boy she has dressed up in a feathered turban. The woman on the right is wearing a dress with a ludicrously full skirt. Her companion wears a long pigtail and is carrying a huge white fur muff. This couple are in a raptures over a teacup held by the woman, and its matching saucer, held by the man. A passion for collecting porcelain was widely seen as a foible of the wealthy. Even the pictures on the wall make fun of fashionable body shapes and the means to achieve them: vast skirts supported on hoops, corsets and high-heeled shoes. In the foreground is a dressed-up monkey reading from a dinner menu offering 'cox combs, ducks tongues, rabbits ears and fricasey of snails'.

Design and Designing
Mary Edwards (1704-1743) commissioned William Hogarth to paint the picture this print is based on. She wanted to get her own back on people who had ridiculed her for wearing old-fashioned clothes.

Trading
Hogarth originally refused permission to have his painting made into a print, but in 1746 an unknown etcher ignored his wishes. A newspaper advert of 24 May announced 'On Monday next will be published an entertaining new Print called Taste in High Life from an incomparable Picture by Mr Hogarth proving beyond contradiction, that the present assemblies are mere exotics, and the supporters of such a parcel of Insects'. This print cost sixpence in 1746.