The Upper Class at Bay (From the Vanity of Small Differences)

Grayson Perry’s The Upper Class at Bay (2012) is one from the series of six monumental tapestries produced by the artist under the collective title The Vanity of Small Differences. The series responds to William Hogarth’s eighteenth-century satirical masterpiece The Rake’s Progress, which traced the story of a wealthy heir, Tom Rakewell, who squanders his inheritance on riotous living. Perry’s reimagining reverses this narrative, following the fictional ‘Tim Rakewell’ as he transcends his working-class roots, and presents in turn an extraordinary chronicle of social mobility in twenty-first-century Britain. The characters and scenes that populate the series were directly inspired by the artist’s 2012 Channel 4 documentary All in the Best Possible Taste, which saw Perry discuss themes of taste and class with diverse social groups across the UK. Works from the edition have been widely exhibited over the past decade, with a complete set of all six held by the Arts Council Collection, London. Most recently, The Vanity of Small Differences was exhibited in Smash Hits, a retrospective of Perry’s vast oeuvre held at the National Gallery of Scotland in 2023. Perry, known for his biting social critique and anti-establishment rhetoric, is one of the most important living artists working in Britain today. In 2023 he received a knighthood for his services to the arts.

As Perry himself has explained, in The Upper Class at Bay we encounter Tim Rakewell and his wife in their late forties. The narrative has traced Rakewell’s ascendancy from humble childhood to wealthy tech developer, and here we find the couple walking in the garden of their grand home. They present a contemporary Mr. and Mrs. Andrews from Thomas Gainsborough’s famous portrait. They are new money, caught in the flux of twentieth century Britain’s possibilities for social mobility. Before them, the sun is setting on the age of landed gentry; an old aristocratic stag with a hide of tattered tweed is hounded by the dogs of tax, social change, upkeep and fuel bills. Behind, the cries of ‘Occupy’-style protesters interrupt the Rakewells’ evening stroll. The silhouette of one protestor is caught between the stag’s antlers, evoking paintings of the vision of Saint Hubert, who left his life of nobility after seeing a vision of a crucifix above the head of a stag.

Through the medium of tapestry Perry extends the social and cultural enquiries that have long been central to his celebrated ceramic practice, riffing on the grand wall-hangings that he observed in some of Britain’s finest country houses during his 2012 ‘safari amongst the taste tribes of Britain.’ Referencing early Renaissance paintings, as well as iconic images of wealth and display from the history of art, The Vanity of Small Differences presents a contemporary parable on class mobility in modern Britain, and on the ways in which social class shapes aesthetic disposition. The series’ title is a pun on Sigmund Freud’s concept of ‘the narcissism of small differences’: the notion that the people we are most keen to distinguish ourselves from are in fact those with whom we share the most in common. Indeed, for all Tim Rakewell’s societal ‘progress’, the final tapestry in the cycle concludes with a scene of him lying dead after a car crash. Having himself transcended working-class origins to achieve international celebrity status, with this series Perry seems to offer a poignant reminder that, whatever dizzying heights we may achieve, none of us are beyond life’s great equalising forces.