It depicts a group of distinguished Victorians visiting the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 1881, just after the death of the Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, whose portrait (visible in the archway at the back of the room) by John Everett Millais was included on a screen at the special request of Queen Victoria.

Oscar Wilde, one of the main proponents of Aestheticism, is depicted at the right, with signature lily buttonhole, surrounded by female admirers, standing in front of the boy in the green suit.

Behind Wilde, further to the right, a group of opponents glare disapprovingly at him as he speaks: painters Philip Calderon and Henry Stacy Marks, sculptor Joseph Boehm, and journalist G.A.

The man with sideburns looking over Thompson's left shoulder is William Agnew, picture dealer and recently elected Liberal MP for South East Lancashire, next to Lord Chief Justice of England Sir John Coleridge.

[2] In the centre of the composition, bearded and dressed in a brown frock coat, stands Frederic Leighton, President of the Royal Academy, talking to a seated woman, Constance, Countess of Lonsdale.

He wears a top hat, and stands just behind and to the left of poet and playwright Robert Browning, the bare-headed and white-bearded figure seen talking to an unknown woman in a green dress.

At the left of the painting stands the "homely figure" of Anthony Trollope (who died on 6 December 1882), with full white beard and top hat, noting in a book as he gazes at an "aesthetic" family in the foreground to the right, comprising a woman in green with sunflower buttonhole gazing at the artworks (a professional model, Jenny Trip[3]), a woman in yellow reading her catalogue, and a girl in orange looking up at her.

Frith describes them as "a family of pure aesthetes absorbed in affected study of the pictures" with Trollope affording "a striking contrast to the eccentric forms near him."

[4] The painting has been exhibited several times:[5] Frith was inspired by the satirical cartoons of George du Maurier (whose head is visible between the orange and green attired aesthetes at the left) and by Gilbert and Sullivan's popular operetta Patience, first performed in 1881.