Three Regents of an orphanage seated at a table

This sheet was attributed to Hogarth by an earlier collector who jotted the artist's name on the mount. The attribution was retained by Fairfax Murray but rejected by Paul Oppe in 1948. As Oppe suggested, the sheet is likely by a Dutch artist yet to be identified. It depicts a council of regents for an orphanage, almshouse, or foundling hospital, meeting in an interior with a painting relevant to their charitable work hanging on the wall in the background. The collector's mark at lower right, G.F., has been linked by An van Camp to the early nineteenth-century English collector George Fairholme, who collected mostly Italian, German, and Dutch drawings.