Blank greetings card with envelope featuring:

'The Gaols Committee of the House of Commons' NPG 926

© National Portrait Gallery, London

by William Hogarth

In the early eighteenth century, Britain's prisons were notorious for their brutality and unsanitary conditions. In 1729, after news of the corruption and abuses at London's Fleet Prison, the House of Commons established a Committee 'to enquire into the state of Gaols in this Kingdom'. In this painting, William Hogarth imagines members of the Committee meeting in a dungeon-like space at the Fleet Prison to be presented with a prisoner. The kneeling prisoner is meant to be Jacob Mendes da Sola, a Portuguese Jew, whose... more

Card size: 125mm x 175mm

Images are printed in their original proportions, within a white border.