Evening, plate 3 from the series The Four Times of Day

Hogarth painted The Four Times of Day about 1736 as decoration for Vauxhall Gardens, a fashionable pleasure garden along the Thames which catered to the aristocracy. Satirizing popular middle- and lower-class entertainments in London, the scenes also allude to traditional cycles of the four times of day, the four seasons, the four ages of man, and (possibly) the four stages of matrimony.

On a summer evening, a London family returns from an outing to Sadler's Wells, the Vauxhall Gardens of the middle class. The imposing wife is pregnant; her cuckolded husband (note the clever placement of the horns of the cow just beyond) carries one young child and two squabbling siblings follow behind.