William Hogarth 1697–1764
NG 113–NG 118 
‘Six pictures called Marriage A‐la‐Mode’

Judy Egerton, 2000

Extracted from:
Judy Egerton, The British Paintings (London: National Gallery Company and Yale University Press, 2000).

c. 1743, engraved and published 1745

• NG 113: The Marriage Settlement
• NG 114: The Tête à Tête
• NG 115: The Inspection
• NG 116: The Toilette
• NG 117: The Bagnio
• NG 118: The Lady’s Death

Oil on canvas, average size approx. 70 × 90.8 cm (28 × 36 in.) (NG 113, 114, 115 and 118 each 69.9 × 90.8 cm; NG 116 and 11770.5 × 90.8 cm)

Provenance

Painted by the artist to be engraved: announced in Mr HOGARTH’S PROPOSALS…, 25 January 1745¹ as to be offered (with other paintings) for sale ‘to the Highest Bidder’ after the engravings from them were finished: although represented (by Scene 2) on the engraved ticket issued to would‐be bidders,² not in fact included in the sale of 21 paintings announced in his PROPOSALS and concluded 28 February 1745, since the engravings were not finished by then (they are dated 1 April 1745, though not issued until June); advertised by Hogarth 28 May 1751 as for sale ‘to the Highest Bidder’ by twelve o’clock noon on 6 June 1751, and purchased that day by John Lane for 120 guineas (£126); retained by John Lane of Hillingdon, Middlesex, until his death in 1791;³ inherited with the bulk of his estate by John Fenton Cawthorne MP; offered by him at Christie’s, 10 March 1792 (72, last lot, described as ‘these matchless celebrated pictures…’), bt in at 910 guineas (£945 10s. 0d.); became the subject of an agreement between Cawthorne and Alderman John Boydell 4 April 1792 for publishing a new set of engravings;⁴ mortgaged to Mr Holmes by 15 June 1795; offered at Christie’s 21 May 1796 (112), bt in; sold, presumably by Holmes, Christie’s 10 February 1797 at 2pm, as the only published lot⁵ in a four‐page Catalogue of the most Capital and Matchless Set of Originals of the Marriage a la Mode, The Chef d’œuvres of the Immortal Hogarth, in the most perfect State of Preservation, bt John Julius Angerstein, 1000 guineas (£1050): purchased with the Angerstein Collection by the Treasury for the National Gallery 1824.

Exhibited

Displayed in the Covent Garden auction rooms of Hogarth’s friend Christopher Cock, perhaps to the end of 1748 ;⁶ displayed in Alderman John Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery, Pall Mall, from May 1792 , to publicise a set of mezzotint engravings of the pictures commissioned by Boydell from Richard Earlom, and published by Boydell 1795–1800;⁷ BI 1814 (110–15); International Exhibition 1862 (British Division, Painting, 42–7); (NG 114 and 116) Amsterdam 1936 (68, 69), and Paris, Louvre, 1938 (64, 65); (all six) Chicago, New York and Toronto 1946–7 (1); (NG 113) Montreal Museum of Fine Art, Man and his World, 1967 (113); (all six) Tate Gallery 1971–2 (139–44); (NG 111 and 118) Leningrad and Moscow 1988.

At the Tate Gallery 1919–50 ; 1960–1; 1963–4 .

Literature

André Rouquet, Lettres de Monsieur ** à un de ses Amis à Paris Pour lui expliquer les Estampes de Monsieur Hogarth, London 1746, ‘Lettre Troizième’, pp. 29–43 (for an English translation, see Wensinger and Coley 1970, cited below); [Revd John Trusler], Hogarth Moralized. Being a Complete Edition of Hogarth’s Works…, originally published in fourteen numbers 1766–8; republished 1831; Walpole, Anecdotes, 1780, ed. James Dallaway, London 1827, pp. 126–49; John Ireland, Hogarth Illustrated, London 1791, II, pp. 4–45; Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Ausführliche Erklärung der Hogarthischen Kupferstiche, mit verkleinerten aber vollständigen Copien derselben von. E. Riepenhausen, vol. V, Göttingen 1797 (for an English translation, see Wensinger and Coley 1970, cited below); John Nichols and George Steevens, The Genuine Works of William Hogarth, II, London 1808, pp. 118–22; Charles Lamb, ‘On the Genius and Character of Hogarth’, first published in ed. Leigh Hunt, Reflector, 1811, reprinted in ed. Roy Park, Lamb as Critic, London 1980, pp. 315–34; William Hazlitt, ‘On Hogarth’s Marriage A‐La‐Mode’, partly published in the London Magazine, 1824, reprinted in Criticisms in Art, and Sketches of the Picture Galleries of England (‘edited by his son’), 1843, pp. 143–51; Waagen 1854, I, pp. 363–4; Théophile Gautier, ‘William Hogarth’, L’Artiste, August 1868, pp. 155–72; F.G. Stephens, Catalogue of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum: Division 1. Political and Personal Satires, III, Part I, 1877, nos. 2688, 2702, 2717, 2731, 2744, 2758; Robert Etheridge Moore, Hogarth’s Literary Relationships, Minneapolis 1948, pp. 53–8, 62–5, 129–30; Paul Oppé, The Drawings of William Hogarth, Oxford 1948, pp. 11–13; Waterhouse 1953, p. 122; Hilde Kurz, ‘Italian Modes of Hogarth’s Picture Series’, JWCI , XV, 1957 1952 , pp. 136–63; Davies 1959, pp. 48–68; A.S. Wensinger and W.B. Coley, Hogarth on High Life, Middletown, Conn. 1970 (includes a fully edited and annotated English translation of Lichtenberg’s commentary on Marriage A‐la‐Mode, 1797, pp. 3–113;⁸ an English translation of Rouquet’s ‘Lettre Troizième’, 1746, pp. 126–30; and a reprint of the anon. poem, Marriage A‐la‐Mode: An Humorous Tale, in Six Cantos, in Hudibrastic Verse,⁹ London 1746, pp. 131–47); Paulson 1971: see particularly I, pp. 456–66, 477–84, and II, pp. 62–3, 122–6; Webster 1978, pp. 101–14; Bindman 1981, reprinted 1994, pp. 55,108–15; David Bomford and Ashok Roy, ‘Hogarth’s “Marriage à la Mode” ’; (2) Ashok Roy, ‘Hogarth’s “Marriage à la Mode” and contemporary painting practice’, both in NG Technical Bulletin, 6, 1982, pp. 45–58; pp. 59–67 (condensed in Technical Notes below); Lance Bertelsen, ‘The Interior Structure of Hogarth’s Marriage à la Mode’, in Art History, 6, no. 2, June 1983, pp. 131–42; Robert L.S. Cowley, Marriage A‐la‐Mode: A re‐view of Hogarth’s narrative art, Manchester 1983, passim ; [page 147][page 148] David Dabydeen, Hogarth’s Blacks, Athens, Georgia, 1987, pp. 46, 64, 74; R.S. Morton, ‘Syphilis in art: an entertainment in four parts. Part 3: The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, in Genitourinary Medicine, British Medical Association, London 1990, 66, no. 3; N.F. Lowe, ‘Hogarth, Beauty Spots, and Sexually Transmitted Diseases’, in British Journal for Eighteenth‐Century Studies, 15, no. 1, 1992, pp. 71–9; Judy Egerton, Marriage A‐la‐Mode, exh. cat., NG 1997; David Bindman, Hogarth and his Times, exh. cat., British Museum and tour, London 1997, pp. 104–9.

Engraved

with general title Marriage A‐la‐Mode, followed by Plate I, Plate II etc., but without individual titles. Each lettered Invented Painted & Published by W^m Hogarth *** According to Act of Parliament April 1^st 1745. Plate I and Plate VI Engraved by G. Scotin; Plate II and Plate III Engraved by B. Baron; Plate IV Engraved by S. Ravenet; Plate V Engraved by R[sic].F. Ravenet.

Bernard Baron’s drawings of Scenes 2 and 3, made in red chalk and squared for the purpose of engraving, are in the collection of Her Majesty The Queen; each on paper, Scene 2: 36 × 45.8 cm, Scene 3: 35.7 × 45.8 cm (see A.P. Oppé, English Drawings: Stuart and Georgian Periods …at Windsor Castle, London 1950, cat. nos. 362, 363).

The copperplates noted by Paulson (1989, p. 115) as having been acquired in 1954 by the firm of Thomas Ross are not the original plates engraved by Baron, Ravenet and Scotin, which do not appear to have survived; they are smaller (27 × 37 cm) and not very skilful anon. copies. Copies of the original engravings made by Ernst Riepenhausen (1765–1839) for reproduction in Lichtenberg, Ausführliche Erklärung der Hogarthischen Kupferstiche… V, 1797, are reproduced in Wensinger and Coley 1970, pp. 18, 34, 44, 62, 82 and 96. For other copies see Stephens 1877.

Copies

These include (1) a set of six, oil on canvas, approximately the same size as the originals, belonging by 1842 to H.R. Willett Esq, of Merley House, Dorsetshire; fully described in the Gentleman’s Magazine, New Series, XVII, 1842, pp. 70–2.¹⁰ This set was exhibited as by Hogarth at Leeds City Art Gallery, National Exhibition of Works of Art, 1868 (1234–9), lent by W. Adye [Willett L. Adye]; offered by H.R. Willett, Christie’s 10 July 1869 (57), bt in; offered by anon. as from the collection of H.R. Willett, Christie’s 22 March 1902 (41), bt Harvey; untraced since then; (2) a set of six, oil on canvas, approximately same size as the originals, in a North Carolina collection in 1992 (photographs in NG Archives), not corresponding to the details of the set above given in the Gentleman’s Magazine 1842, and perhaps by a competent nineteenth‐century amateur; (3) pencil drawings of each of the series of six, approximately the same size as the original paintings, present location unknown; photographs in NG Archives suggest that they are the work of an early nineteenth‐century amateur.

Technical Notes

Condensed by David Bomford from NG Technical Bulletin, 6, 1982: (1) David Bomford and Ashok Roy, ‘Hogarth’s “Marriage a la Mode”’, pp. 45–58, 20 figs, including an X‐ray mosaic of each painting and infra‐red photographs of some details; (2) Ashok Roy, ‘Hogarth’s “Marriage a la Mode” and contemporary painting practice’, pp. 59–67, including an analysis of the pigments used in NG 113–18 and a table of the pigment composition of the final layers.

The six canvases (approx. 70 × 90.8 cm, or 28 × 36 in.) are of the size known as Kit Cat, the smallest of the standard formats intended for portrait painting; they were probably commercially supplied and primed. The ground on all six is multilayered (NG 113 has one less layer than the others), oil‐based, and consists of calcium carbonate, lead white and traces of carbon black and red earth. The overall colour of the uppermost layer is a cream/buff.

Hogarth’s basic palette in the Marriage A‐la‐Mode series is conventional but he has used quite complicated pigment mixtures in some of the sombre background tonalities of olive green, grey and brown. High‐key colour is provided by just three brightly coloured pigments – vermilion, Naples yellow and ultramarine – and white. The rest of the palette consists of Prussian blue, bone black, a range of red, yellow and brown earth colours, small amounts of red lake and a single occurrence of the blue glass pigment smalt. No green pigments were found: all areas of green paint are based on mixtures of Prussian blue with either Naples yellow or yellow ochre.

The first recorded examination was in 1859 in which all six paintings are described as ‘wire‐cracked’ (deep cracking exposing the pale ground). All six canvases had been lined by then, three of them (113, 117 and 118) apparently because they had sustained tears (repaired early in the nineteenth century) in an approximately similar position in the upper left quarter, possibly when stacked together. Five were relined in 1964–5; 115 was relined in 1980–1. All were cleaned, restored and technically examined in 1980–1.

NG 113: The Marriage Settlement

Condition: Canvas, lined; a repaired tear above Silvertongue’s head. Cleaned 1980; condition good except for extensive craquelure across the whole surface. There is also small‐scale shrinkage in the ceiling and in the background picture frames which was reduced by retouching in the 1980 restoration.

Technical examination: NG 113 differs from the others in having finer canvas and a thinner ground. Possibly this suggests that Hogarth was unsure of the extent of the series at this point, otherwise he would surely have had six identical canvases ready.

The finer canvas and thinner ground allow a more legible X‐ray image, which reveals several significant pentimenti. Both dogs were originally lying down. The lawyer looking out of the window originally faced towards the Earl and seems to have been leaning over, both hands held up in front of him, to whisper to the man standing at the table. The entire window was completed before the canopy was painted. In [page 149]the position now occupied by the oval picture of Medusa was a tall rectangular painting in a plain narrow frame; the long horizontal picture on the window wall was originally a little lower. The finger of the Earl, indicating his family tree, seems to have been a late addition, although there is no doubt that it is by Hogarth; it is painted in much denser paint than the rest of the hand, and unlike the rest of the hand, it passes over the already completed parchment.

NG 114: The Tête à Tête

Condition: Canvas, lined. Cleaned 1980: very good condition generally; a small paint loss across the Viscount’s chest and some prominent craquelure, both retouched in the 1980 restoration.

Technical examination: Significant pentimenti are revealed by X‐rays and infra‐red reflectography. The table beside the Viscountess was originally shown without a cloth and, presumably, without the china, whose pieces are painted over the cloth. Her figure has been altered also: her right arm was originally lower and she was probably not holding the mirror that she now has; her eyes appear at first to have been looking away from her husband. The steward’s upraised hand has been slightly repositioned.

There is a major change in the curtained picture behind the central columns. An infra‐red reflectogram reveals that the painting was originally uncurtained and depicted an Adoration, with a Virgin and Child to the left of the columns and the back of a kneeling man between the columns. This would have been a natural accompaniment to the figures of standing saints on the same wall, but Hogarth painted it out and substituted the curtain and the suggestive foot.

NG 115: The Inspection

Condition: Canvas, lined. Cleaned and relined, 1980–1: a very prominent craquelure in all parts of the painting was reduced somewhat by retouching in the 1980–1 restoration. A small damage at the left of the woman’s black skirt.

Technical examination: the large woman was first painted nearer to the Viscount: another position of her head is visible in X‐rays to the right of the present one. Other pentimenti are visible on the picture itself. The woman’s black skirt was originally shorter and revealed most of her shoe. A retort, originally visible under the table at the left, has been covered by the tablecloth. The upright screw on the machine at the right edge has been shortened so that the last lines of the inscription in the book can be read.

NG 116: The Toilette

Condition: Canvas, lined. Cleaned 1980–1; a general craquelure and some small‐scale shrinkage cracking in dark areas were reduced by retouching in the 1980–1 restoration.

Technical examination: Several pentimenti show in the X‐ray. The position of Silvertongue was moved twice. At first he was much nearer the screen than he is now, and may have been sitting more or less upright rather than lying on the sofa: his head was midway between the present head and upraised hand. In that first position, more of the dressing‐table would have been visible: it was indeed painted but is now covered by his arm. There is also a second position of the head slightly higher than the present one.

The hairdresser curling the Countess’s hair originally had a fantastic hairstyle himself, piled‐up and topped with curling papers, visible in the X‐ray reaching up as far as the picture frame above him. The plate in the basket bearing the Leda and the Swan design was not present originally: two jars were in this position. The Catalogue in front of the basket originally showed two white pages but the left one was painted over to form the inside of the dark coloured cover.

NG 117: The Bagnio

Condition: Canvas, lined; a repaired diagonal tear about 5 cm long upper left in the bed canopy. Cleaned 1981; an especially prominent craquelure in all parts of the picture, caused in part by the complexity of the layer structure, revealing the pale ground and underlayers through the cracks: this was reduced by retouching in the 1981 restoration.

Technical examination: This is the most revised picture of the series. Major alterations were made during the painting process, all of which are visible in X‐rays and an infra‐red reflectogram. At the left edge, Hogarth originally painted and then suppressed the figure of a woman turning away or fleeing from the scene. On the evidence of an unclear infra‐red photograph, Davies 1959¹¹ thought this was of an ‘oldish’ woman and suggested that it might be part of an earlier, unconnected picture which Hogarth had painted over. A recent infra‐red reflectogram shows the figure more clearly as youngish, her arms held in front of her and hurrying leftwards. The X‐ray image shows the figure in a slightly different position, indicating that it was reworked at least once. In the X‐ray, the woman is open‐mouthed and holds a sword (not visible in infra‐red) diagonally across her body, the hilt alongside her face. She appears to be dressed in loose clothes and to be wearing a cap not unlike that now worn by the kneeling countess.

There are three possible explanations for this figure. First, as Davies proposed, that she is from an unconnected composition: but the presence of the sword and the general similarities of scale and dress now make this unlikely. Second, that it is a woman other than the Countess – perhaps a servant – hurrying away to hide Silvertongue’s sword: but the presence of another woman with the lovers in the bagnio seems unlikely. Third, that it is the Countess herself attempting to flee with the evidence: if this is the correct explanation, then the composition at this early stage has to be envisaged without the centrally placed Countess kneeling at her husband’s feet.

The other major alterations to the composition are to the right of the dying Earl where another painted‐out woman can be seen in the X‐ray (but not in infra‐red). This woman is short, wide and dressed in a shawl and voluminous clothes: she holds up a lantern in her right hand, and her left hand is flung back towards the door where the officers of the watch enter. She seems to be the keeper of the bagnio entering first to discover the tragedy. Behind her, the door is burst off its [page 150]hinges and leans at an angle against the wall. Subsequently, Hogarth clearly decided to simplify the composition here; he suppressed the woman’s figure completely and repainted the door open but still on its hinges, only the lock broken off and lying on the floor.

Other less prominent pentimenti are visible in the X‐ray. There are changes in the position of the Earl’s head and legs. His contrapposto pose may have been somewhat emphasised as the composition developed. There is the faint indication of a sword lying across his feet rather than falling. The space beyond the window through which Silvertongue escapes is light in the X‐ray, suggesting that Hogarth may once have contemplated dawn breaking outside; but in the painting it is dark, and night is clearly intended.

NG 118: The Lady’s Death

Condition: Canvas, lined; a repaired three‐cornered tear about 6 cm across in the upper left centre, to the left of the clock. Cleaned 1981. Much cracked in all parts allowing the pale ground to show through; some wearing of the darks especially near the left edge, retouched in the 1981 restoration.

Technical examination: Some pentimenti show in the X‐ray. The table appears originally to have been without a cloth (like the table in NG 113). The still‐life painting in its black and gold frame was completed before the picture hanging in front of it was added. The overturned chair originally had a high rounded back, like the one by the window, but now has a straight back. There are minor changes of outline in the Countess’s cap and her father’s shoulder. One of the Alderman’s buttons has been painted out, presumably to indicate his parsimony in not having another sewn on.

Titles

Hogarth’s own titles for the paintings are used here, as given in his initial Proposals of 25 January 1745 for selling them (see note 1). Over the years, various different titles (sometimes echoing Hogarth’s titles, sometimes trying to ‘improve’ on them) were invented for the paintings. Only a few examples need be given here. Revd John Trusler (Hogarth Moralized…, 1766–8) called them The Contract; The Breakfast Scene; The Scene with the Quack; The Toilet Scene; The Death of the Earl; The Death of the Countess. The earliest descriptive National Gallery catalogues ( c. 1838–40) call them The Contract of Marriage; After Marriage; Progress of the Husband’s Profligacy; The Toilet; The Duel; Death of the Countess. For most of this century they have been called The Marriage Contract; Shortly after the Marriage; The Visit to the Quack Doctor; The Countess’s Morning Levée; The Killing of the Earl; The Suicide of the Countess. Quite apart from having no authority from the artist himself, such titles lack Hogarth’s pithiness, and sometimes miss his points. The only writer who has hitherto respected Hogarth’s original titles is Cowley 1983 (p. vii, and passim); this compiler follows him in the conviction that Hogarth’s own titles for the paintings should be used.

Discussion

In ‘Autobiographical Notes’ compiled about 1763,¹² Hogarth recounts that after ‘a few years’ of painting portraits and conversation pieces, he realised that ‘that manner of Painting was not sufficiently paid to do everything my family required’. He continues 'I therefore turn[ed] my thoughts to still a more new way of proceeding, viz. painting and Engraving modern moral subject[s] a Field unbroke up in any Country or any age.’¹³

In designing fully elaborated pictorial narratives which enact a complete story of contemporary life, scene by scene, Hogarth created a new form of art.¹⁴ Hogarth’s description of them as ‘modern moral subjects’ is memorably alliterative as well as concise; but it is worth noting that elsewhere in his ‘Autobiographical Notes’ he more aptly linked the two adjectives ‘Comic and Moral’ to describe this ‘manner of designing’.¹⁵ The ‘moral’ ingredient in his ‘modern moral subjects’ was characteristic of his own approach to life. He did not preach virtue; instead, he satirised vice and folly. He could never remain serious for very long; as Horace Walpole noted, ‘the burlesque turn of his mind mixed itself with the most serious subjects’.¹⁶ In calling Hogarth a ‘Comic History Painter’, Henry Fielding invented an entirely appropriate new category for his friend.¹⁷ A century later, the poet and critic Théophile Gautier, who had reviewed the paintings of Marriage A‐la‐Mode after seeing them in the International Exhibition of 1862, declared ‘S’il a jamais existé un peintre absolument original, c’est à coup sûr Hogarth’ (‘If ever a painter could be said to be truly original, Hogarth was the man, no doubt about it’).¹⁸

Hogarth intended from the start that his ‘modern moral subjects’ should be engraved. In the form of engravings, they proved instantly popular. Though he does not mention it as an incentive to his ‘new way of proceeding’, Hogarth himself probably needed the stimulus of working for a wider audience than painting for private patrons allowed. The first of his ‘modern moral subjects’ was A Harlot’s Progress, in six scenes, completed in 1731 and engraved by Hogarth himself as a set of six prints published in 1732.¹⁹ Through the ‘Notebooks’ of the engraver George Vertue, we know more about the public reception of this series than we do about that of Marriage A‐la‐Mode, published thirteen years later (and to that extent less novel). Vertue recorded that the ‘Story’ of the Harlot ‘captivated the Minds of most people persons of all ranks & conditions from the greatest Quality to the meanest’.²⁰ The engravings were offered to subscribers at a guinea a set; according to Vertue, 1240 sets were printed, and fully subscribed for. Members of the public who could not afford to buy original paintings could thus purchase prints which directly reflected the wit, invention and mastery of a contemporary English genius.

A Harlot’s Progress was followed by A Rake’s Progress, in eight scenes; the paintings were completed by mid‐1734, and the engravings published June 1735, with similar success.²¹ Seven or eight years passed during which Hogarth was chiefly engaged in painting portraits on the scale of life, such as Captain Coram, 1740, and The Graham Children, 1742 (NG 4756, pp. 134–45). In April 1743 he announced his next [page 151]‘modern moral subject’. It was to be called Marriage A‐la‐Mode, and would represent ‘a Variety of Modern Occurrences in High‐Life’.²² As the latter phrase promises, this series was to be more than a satire on marriage. Recurring throughout Marriage A‐la‐Mode is an exposure of the shallowness and stupidity of the way of life of people with more money than taste, those who follow fashionable trends instead of discriminating between good and bad. In this sense, Marriage A‐la‐Mode has two precursors. Hogarth himself described Masquerades and Operas,²³ his first independent print, published in 1724, as ‘representing the bad Taste of the Town’: it depicts crowds following each other into theatres where foreign impresarios stage masquerades, pantomimes and operas while the works of great English dramatists such as Shakespeare, Congreve, Dryden and Ben Jonson are wheeled away as ‘Waste paper for Shops’. A single painting of 1742 called Taste in High Life (fig. 1),²⁴ in which two equally effete ‘connoisseurs’ share ecstasies over a tiny cup and saucer, while a fashionably dressed monkey studies a menu of exotic food, in some sense anticipates the lack of ‘taste’ displayed throughout Marriage A‐la‐Mode. Hogarth’s representations of ‘bad taste’ are comic, but they are more than mild jokes at the expense of the idle rich, for underlying them is his sense of outrage that the possibilities of getting the best out of life and art should be wasted. Aptly, the name he chose for the noble family in Marriage A‐la‐Mode was Squander.

Hogarth first advertised his Marriage A‐la‐Mode project on 2 April 1743, inviting subscriptions in advance for engravings not yet begun. He had probably by then started work on at least some of the six paintings; but at this stage he may not have had all six scenes clearly in mind. According to Vertue, the series A Harlot’s Progress began with a single picture of ‘a common harlot… just riseing about noon out of bed’ and then developed, as Hogarth’s ‘thoughts encreas’d, [page 152]and multiplyed by his fruitfull invention’,²⁵ into six different subjects. The deliberate and assured design of the first three scenes of Marriage A‐la‐Mode is not matched in the last three. In these, Hogarth may have relied on his well‐known capacity for ‘invention’ as ideas developed. Certainly, as the Technical Notes above make clear, Scene 5 was largely worked out on the canvas as he went along.

No preliminary studies for Marriage A‐la‐Mode are known; and none may have been made. Hogarth himself claimed that he had cultivated ‘the habit of retaining in my minds Eye whatever I design’d to Imitate, without directly drawing it at the time’.²⁶ This ability to formulate a composition in his mind appears to have enabled Hogarth to proceed directly to his canvas without preparatory studies on paper.²⁷ Improvisation sometimes took over; sometimes he made changes or added details as a picture progressed. In some cases he made oil sketches, which he seems to have kept only if he did not proceed to a finished picture. The Marriage Contract (Ashmolean Museum), an oil sketch of about 1732 evidently designed as a possible second scene in A Rake’s Progress (with a contract of marriage between the unheeding rake and an elderly heiress discussed around a table), was fairly fully developed before being laid aside. The pictures on the walls and the antique busts on the floor were to provide some ideas for Marriage A‐la‐Mode over ten years later.

Hogarth probably worked on the paintings of Marriage A‐la‐Mode throughout 1743, and perhaps in the early part of the next year; but progress was necessarily interrupted by the need to organise work on the engravings. Hogarth had himself engraved his earlier series A Harlot’s Progress and A Rake’s Progress. For Marriage A‐la‐Mode, which differed from the earlier series in being a ‘High Life’ subject, he decided to employ French engravers. There were many of these working in England, producing book illustrations and sets of engravings in an elegant rococo style which a sophisticated public had come to expect.²⁸ It may have been primarily as a publicity stunt that Hogarth announced that Marriage A‐la‐Mode would be engraved ‘by the best Masters in Paris’; and he let it be known that he would make a special trip to Paris to commission them. Whether Hogarth’s visit to Paris allowed time to visit the Salon, or the studios of such artists as Chardin, Jean‐François de Troy and Hyacinthe Rigaud (to whose works he was to make some allusion in Marriage A‐la‐Mode), whether he saw the figure drawings of Carle van Loo in which pictures line the walls, or saw Watteau’s picture‐crowded L’Enseigne de Gersaint²⁹ in the shop of Gersaint the picture dealer, must remain speculative.

In the end, Marriage A‐la‐Mode was engraved by three French‐born and French‐trained engravers working in London, Bernard Baron (?1696–1762), Gérard Jean‐Baptiste Scotin (born 1690) and Simon‐François Ravenet (?1706–74),³⁰ each working on two plates. Both Baron and Scotin had in fact lived and worked in London for many years. Vertue included both of them in 1738 in his list of the six ‘really good masters’ of the art of print engraving in England.³¹ Baron, a print‐dealer as well as engraver, seems to have been a friend of Hogarth, and had done some work for him before.³² Scotin had assisted Hogarth on plate II of A Rake’s Progress. Ravenet’s visit in about 1744 may have been chiefly to engrave two plates of Marriage A‐la‐Mode, but he was also working for Hayman;³³ he may have been in England before, and was to settle in London. All three had engraved plates after Watteau for Le Recueil Jullienne,³⁴ and could thus be relied upon to contribute the ‘Elegancy’ which Hogarth had promised in his advertisement of 2 April 1743. Baron himself owned a painting by Watteau (Les Deux Cousines), which he engraved; he had also engraved the two paintings by Watteau which Hogarth probably knew best: Comédiens Italiens³⁵ and L’Amour paisible,³⁶ painted for Dr Mead during Watteau’s visit to London in 1719–20, expressly to consult Dr Mead about his consumptive condition.

The paintings may not have been completed much before 24 April 1744, when Hogarth advertised that the plates from them ‘are now Engraving’. Subscriptions continued to be taken until 1 May 1744, when the prints were fully subscribed for. Vertue confirms that the prints ‘sold … well to a … large subscription’.³⁷ The price of one guinea per set of six engravings, charged in 1732 for A Harlot’s Progress, was held for Marriage A‐la‐Mode. As a receipt for payment of the first half‐guinea, subscribers were issued with a print of Hogarth’s etching Characters and Caricaturas,³⁸ based on one of Agostino Carracci’s sheets of caricatures; Hogarth designed this to show that an infinite variety of ‘characters’ could be suggested without resorting to caricature. Below the etching he refers readers to the preface to Henry Fielding’s novel Joseph Andrews, 1742. It is there that Fielding calls Hogarth ‘a Comic History Painter’, but one whose characters are free from the ‘distortions and exaggerations’ of caricature. While there is undeniably ‘exaggeration’ in Taste in High Life, there is little which can truly be called caricature in Marriage A‐la‐Mode. Though no list of subscribers survives, there is no reason to suppose that subscribers to Marriage A‐la‐Mode were any less diverse than those to A Harlot’s Progress, whom Vertue had described as ‘of all ranks & conditions from the greatest Quality to the meanest’. Among the surviving receipts are two for old friends: John Huggins, poet and Warden of the Fleet Prison, whose portrait Hogarth painted about this time,³⁹ and William Tothall, draper, who had been on the ‘Five Days’ Peregrination’.⁴⁰ In an advertisement of 8 November 1744, the prints were said to be ‘in great Forwardness’. All six plates carry the publication line 1 April 1745; the prints were ready for subscribers to collect early in June.⁴¹

The earliest description of the engravings of Marriage A‐la‐Mode, a short, lively and witty account written by Hogarth’s neighbour André Rouquet, enamel painter, was published with Hogarth’s approval in 1746, within a year of their publication.⁴² Hogarth’s engravings in general began (in Francis Haskell’s words) to be scrutinised for their meanings ‘with far greater care than had yet been given to the Bayeux Tapestry’.⁴³ There have been and no doubt will continue to be many commentaries on Hogarth’s works,⁴⁴ some more eccentric than others, all seeking to explain what Horace Walpole called the ‘multiplicity of little incidents, not essential to, but always heightening the principal action’.⁴⁵ [page 153]For Marriage A‐la‐Mode in particular, F.G. Stephens’s discussion of the engravings in the British Museum Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires, 1877, provided a basis of sane and well‐informed comment on which most subsequent commentators have built. Many of Hogarth’s details and allusions are deliberately ambiguous; and since Marriage A‐la‐Mode is after all a comic narrative, not verifiable fact, there can be no single authoritative explanation. Most previous commentaries have been based on the engravings, which are of course uncoloured, and in reverse direction to the paintings.⁴⁶ Absorption in the study of the engravings has led at least one modern scholar to suggest that the care which Hogarth lavished on the paintings was redundant, since ‘content is more effectively and economically accomplished in the prints’;⁴⁷ but this is to disregard Hogarth’s double purpose in painting the six scenes of Marriage A‐la‐Mode. Certainly he intended this series to be engraved; but first he had to create the drama and the dramatis personae, their quirks and foibles, their relationships to each other and their elaborate settings. That stage was worked out in paint, and as an act of creation in its own right. Hogarth himself wrote that ‘By the beauty of colouring, the painters mean that disposition of colours on objects, together with their proper shades, which appear at the same time distinctly varied and artfully united’, laying particular stress on ‘the great principle of varying all the means of varying, and on the proper and artful union of that variety’.⁴⁸ In Marriage A‐la‐Mode Hogarth uses subtle and exquisite colour to achieve effects which are, in his own phrase, ‘distinctly varied and artfully united’. The canvases which his engravers worked from were thus far richer in tonal effects than was strictly necessary for their purposes. The paintings exist in their own right. Had the project to engrave them failed, Marriage A‐la‐Mode would have been far less widely known, but no less complete. The first perceptions of Hogarth’s subtle use of colour in Marriage A‐la‐Mode come from William Hazlitt in 1843 and Théophile Gautier in 1868; their comments are as a breath of fresh air after the earlier (and continuing) intense scrutinies of the black and white engravings.

Hogarth’s title (but little else) is taken from John Dryden’s play Marriage A‐la‐Mode, first performed in 1672 (reprinted 1735, with illustrations by Gravelot).⁴⁹ The anglicised expression ‘a la mode’ (sometimes run into one word, as in Dr Johnson’s Dictionary, where its meaning is given as ‘according to the fashion; a low word’⁵⁰) was popular in the early eighteenth century. A pamphlet of 1728 attacking John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera was entitled Thievery a‐la‐mode. Hogarth’s advertisements for the engravings of his Marriage A‐la‐Mode may have helped to spark off the publication of such ephemera as Wit a‐la‐mode. Or, pithy questions to prevent dulness in modern conversation, by ‘Jasper Quibble’, 1745 and Adultery a‐la‐mode, An Epistle from Lady Traffick to Sir John, 1746.⁵¹

The basic story in Marriage A‐la‐Mode is of a marriage arranged by two self‐seeking fathers – a spendthrift nobleman who needs cash and a rich but plebeian City of London merchant who wants to buy into the aristocracy. The characters and the plot are invented by Hogarth, in the sense that there is no book of words nor single source for them; but marriages between blue blood and City money had been a common phenomenon through three centuries of English history (J.H. Hexter cites in particular ‘the fifteenth century Pastons, with their perpetual negotiations for London heiresses’⁵²), and provided a continuing theme for playwrights and novelists, at least from Philip Massinger’s play A New Way to Pay Old Debts (probably first acted in 1625–6) to Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now (1875). Trollope’s observation that ‘Rank squanders money; trade makes it; – and then trade purchases rank by re‐gilding its splendour’⁵³ is an authentic echo, over a century later, of the theme of Marriage A‐la‐Mode.

Marriages arranged and enforced by parents or guardians against the inclinations of their children prompted satire from Richard Steele in The Spectator⁵⁴ and provided a sardonic subject for playwrights. In Henry Fielding’s comedy Love in Several Masques, first acted in 1728, Sir Positive Trap’s niece Helena rages against her uncle’s determination to marry her to the rich Sir Apish Simple: ‘To be sold! to be put up at auction! to be disposed of, as a piece of goods, by way of bargain and sale.’ But her uncle merely recounts the story of his own marriage, as if it were always the way of the world: ‘I made my addresses to her father, her father to his lawyer, the lawyer to my estate, which being found a Smithfield equivalent – the bargain was struck.’⁵⁵ There are many echoes of Fielding’s plays and novels in Marriage A‐la‐Mode: its first scene might be subtitled ‘The bargain is struck’.

The most pervasive influence in Marriage A‐la‐Mode is from the stage – from Fielding’s plays in particular, but from the stage in general. Hogarth was a devoted play‐goer. He made his name as a painter with a scene from John Gay’s immensely popular The Beggar’s Opera, probably painted soon after its first performance in January 1728; his first painting of the scene in Newgate in which Macheath stands in leg‐irons while Lucy Lockit on one side and Polly Peachum on the other plead (successfully) for his life was so acclaimed that he was commissioned to paint at least four versions of it.⁵⁶ Hogarth’s close friends included the actor David Garrick (1717–79), whom he painted ‘in character’ as Richard III in 1745, and with his wife in 1757,⁵⁷ as well as the artist Francis Hayman (1708–76), who in the 1730s worked as a painter of stage scenery at Goodman’s Fields and Drury Lane theatres.⁵⁸

Hogarth’s ‘Autobiographical Notes’, which are at once ardent and incoherent, include several passages in which he tries to find words with which to link his scenes to stage performances. ‘My picture was my Stage and men and women my actors who were by Mean of certain Actions and Express[ions] to Exhibit a dumb shew.’ He tries again: ‘Let figure[s] be consider[ed] as Actors dresed for the sublime genteel comedy or same in high or low life’; and again: ‘Whether they were comical or tragical … such subjects as the human species are actors in… I found had not often been done [in] the manner I imagin’d them capable of.’⁵⁹ Each scene in Marriage A‐la‐Mode is in a sense ‘staged’. Bertelsen 1983⁶⁰ observes that instead of depicting six completely [page 154]different settings, Hogarth helps to maintain a sense of continuity throughout six scenes by using ‘three room‐types (in the manner of stock scenery)’, one for Scenes 1 and 6 (The Marriage Settlement and The Lady’s Death, where the similar background structures are most obvious, and a resonance between the two scenes is strongest) another for Scenes 2 and 4 (The Tête à Tête and The Toilette), and a third for Scenes 3 and 5 (The Inspection and The Bagnio).

In Proposals dated 25 January 1745, Hogarth announced that he would sell a group of pictures by inviting bids to be written in a book in his house. The pictures he proposed to sell in this manner (and did sell, on the last day of February 1745) were the six pictures of A Harlot’s Progress, the eight pictures of A Rake’s Progress, the four pictures (Morning, Noon, Evening and Night) called The Four Times of the Day and Strolling Actresses dressing in a Barn. He added that the six paintings of Marriage A‐la‐Mode (and here he gave their individual titles) would be offered for sale in the same way; but although a sketch of Scene 2 was included in the design of the ‘bidding ticket’ he issued (an engraving entitled The Battle of the Pictures),⁶¹ Hogarth could not in fact include the paintings of Marriage A‐la‐Mode in this sale as the engravers were still working from them.

The paintings of Marriage A‐la‐Mode were offered for sale (by the same system of written bids) ‘to the Highest Bidder’ by twelve noon on 6 June 1751. The result was cruelly disappointing. Perhaps the subjects had become too familiar in the form of engravings. Early on 6 June 1751 Hogarth ‘dressed himself, put on his tye‐wig, strutted away one hour, and fretted away two more’.⁶² Only one advance bid had been made, for £120 for the set of six paintings. Only one visitor attended the house that morning, an evidently unknown admirer called John Lane.⁶³ He offered an advance on the single written bid by making ‘the pounds guineas’ (£126). When the clock struck twelve, Hogarth ‘wished Mr Lane joy of his purchase'; but his chagrin was so evident that Mr Lane generously offered him three more hours in which to find a better purchaser. Hogarth waited only one further hour. At 1 pm he declared Lane to be the outright purchaser. The six paintings were sold in Carlo Maratta frames that had cost Hogarth four guineas apiece.⁶⁴ They are still in their original frames. Thus Hogarth effectively received barely £100 for the six pictures.

The paintings of Marriage A‐la‐Mode remained with John Lane at his house in Hillingdon, Middlesex, some thirteen miles from London. Little is known about him, apart from his own account of the sale, written down for John Nichols, who published it in 1781. His will refers to his ownership of warehouses at Hillingdon, but does not specify their use. Paul Sandby made a charming chalk drawing of Mrs Lane with a distaff, inscribed ‘Wife of M^r Lane who purchased first the pictures by Hogarth of Marriage Alamode’ (fig. 20);⁶⁵ there are two framed pictures on the wall behind her, in the manner of a Carle van Loo drawing, but they do not appear to be scenes from Marriage A‐la‐Mode. After buying Marriage A‐la‐Mode, Lane promised Hogarth ‘that he would never let any person by way of cleaning meddle with them, as he [Hogarth] always desired to take care of them himself’. Lane relates that he received several high offers for the pictures, and that Hogarth ‘repeatedly’ asked if he would part with them; but Lane’s answer was always that ‘He intended to keep them as long as he lived.’⁶⁶

On Lane’s death in 1791, Marriage A‐la‐Mode passed with the greater part of his estate to Colonel John Fenton Cawthorne MP, perhaps a godson, but as unlike Lane himself as any heir in a Hogarthian modern moral history.⁶⁷ He had inherited wealth from several sources, but was evidently a spendthrift and perhaps a gambler. Having inherited the paintings of Marriage A‐la‐Mode, Cawthorne sent them within a year to Christie’s, where they were offered for sale on 10 March 1792, but were bought in at 910 guineas. Subsequently he mortgaged them to a Mr Holmes; they were again offered at Christie’s on 21 May 1796, but again bought in. Meanwhile Cawthorne (Colonel of the Westminster militia from 1791) was court‐martialled and expelled from the House of Commons for embezzling funds allegedly drawn for distribution to his men (in particular, he embezzled the ‘marching guineas’ issued before a major march to troops, some of whom spent them at once on drink, with effects such as can be seen in Hogarth’s The March to Finchley, 1750⁶⁸). The paintings of Marriage A‐la‐Mode were finally sold at Christie’s on 10 February 1797. This time they made what was probably the reserve price of 1000 guineas. They were bought by John Julius Angerstein, a great admirer of Hogarth. After his death in 1823, they were purchased with the Angerstein collection for the nation. They were publicly exhibited for the first time when the new National Gallery opened its doors in May 1824.

The outline of the six individual scenes offered below is a guide to the story and some of its details. It is based on the paintings, not the engravings; and it does not attempt to be a fully detailed commentary.⁶⁹

NG 113
Scene 1: The Marriage Settlement

The setting is the Earl of Squander’s bedroom in his town house; his canopied bed⁷⁰ is in the corner. He might with perfect propriety have been conducting a levée in his bedroom (like the Countess in Scene 4); he is in fact attempting to bluff his way through negotiations over the marriage of his son to the daughter of a nameless but rich Alderman of the City of London.

In the very centre of the scene, still firmly in the Alderman’s hand, is a large parchment document lettered Marriage / Settlem^t /of The R^t Hon^ble The / Lord Viscount [Squanderfield is added in the engraving]. This document will presumably settle great wealth upon the Viscount once he marries the Alderman’s daughter.⁷¹ As part of the bargain, the spendthrift Earl of Squander gets what he most needs – ready cash, in the form of a heap of golden guineas emptied from the money‐bags on the floor on to the table (but one guinea has been ‘left behind’ in a bag), bank notes or promissory notes (one lettered (?) One thousand…, another (?) £ 2000), and the redemption of a mortgage now held out to him by the Alderman’s clerk. Three pins in the clerk’s cuff suggest that his master expects the strictest economy: A Pin a Day is a Groat a Year’.⁷²

The Earl affects indifference to cash, bank notes and the redeemed mortgage, implying that these are trifles compared with what he has to offer. With one hand he indicates his heart, beating (allegedly) with blue blood; with the other he points to a partly unrolled family tree which purports to show direct descent from the bowels of William the Conqueror. Rouquet, the earliest interpreter of these scenes, remarked that one can almost hear this haughty egoist say: ‘Moi, mes armes, mes titres, ma maison, mes ancêtres.’⁷³ But the ancestry claimed in the family tree is probably largely bogus. Descent from the Conqueror is virtually impossible to authenticate.⁷⁴ A ‘gorgeous repertory of genealogical mythology’ was conjured up for many of the new gentry who flourished under the Tudors; artfully concocted pedigrees were not peculiar to the Squanders. The Earl’s eagerness to display his coronet – on his footstool, on the arms of his crutches, on top of the bed canopy behind him, on the back of the chair in which the Alderman sits, on top of the Medusa sconce on the wall – suggests the assertiveness of a parvenu rather than the discreet assurance of the old nobility.

The Earl would be haughtier if he could, but two things cramp his style: first, he is gouty, and must rest one clumsily bandaged foot upon a footstool, and secondly, the fact that he is short of money is obvious to anyone who looks out of the window. The Earl’s lawyer (wearing the cap or coif of a serjeant‐at‐law), who should be concentrating on the business in hand, gazes instead out of the window, holding a framed drawing lettered A Plan of the New / Building of y^e Right Hon / [? Earl]. In the preposterous design of this house, the imperious Earl has presumably overruled his architect. John Harris suggests that the architect may have proposed something like Palladio’s design for the Palazzo Garzadore⁷⁵ and that the Earl then insisted on a façade with three columns above and four below, breaking all architectural rules. This is yet another example of the bad taste which is one of Hogarth’s constant targets. The house is in scaffolding: work on it has stopped because the Earl has no money to pay wages, and those servants still in his employment loiter in their yellow‐green liveries outside the house.

The portrayal of the Earl suggests that Hogarth conceived him as the antithesis of the real‐life philanthropist Captain Thomas Coram, who devoted himself and his money to establishing the Foundling Hospital, and whose portrait Hogarth painted in 1742. Coram is unselfish and unsmart; the Earl is self‐interested and vain. Consequently we feel no sympathy for the Earl’s gout; we do feel touched to note that Coram is a short man, whose feet barely touch the dais on which he sits for his portrait.

Meanwhile the Alderman sits peering through his spectacles at what’s on the table. Just what sort of business he normally transacts – presumably on the Exchange, in the City of London, since he is not associated either here or on his reappearance in Scene 6 with merchandise – is not disclosed. All we sense is that however shrewd he may be elsewhere, he is out of his depth in high society. Stolid, dressed respectably but not fashionably, the Alderman is ill at ease. He has put on his chain of office as an alderman of the City of London (or perhaps as a past Lord Mayor), though this is hardly proper for a private visit; he had trouble tying his stock, which flops round his neck like a skein of wool. He wears a sword, but with no idea how to manage it: its point sticks out ludicrously between his legs. The only way he can hold his own here is by close scrutiny and extreme caution. Presumably he has scrutinised the Marriage Settlement many times already, and is well aware of what it will cost him to marry his daughter to the Earl’s son. Nevertheless, the passage of cash and banknotes in the Earl’s direction needs to be watched carefully. An inkstand and quill pen, sealing wax and a candle are on the table, ready for signing and sealing the settlement: but that moment has not yet arrived.

To the Earl’s son and the Alderman’s daughter (fig. 3), these negotiations over a marriage that neither of them wants must seem as if they had been going on for ever. Equal victims of their fathers’ dealings, they neither care for nor look at each other. Below them on the floor, the iron links which couple the collars of a foxhound and bitch anticipate the bonds of matrimony which will soon couple them. The image is given an extra edge when we know that in the slang of the day, ‘persons chained together in order to be conveyed to gaol are said to be married’.⁷⁶

The bridegroom, at present called Lord Squanderfield,⁷⁷ will succeed as the next Lord Squander when his father dies. Foppish and foolish, he is exquisitely dressed in the latest French fashion, down to the red heels of his shoes (fig. 3). He does not in the least resemble the Earl, his father, who for all his faults is canny and combative. Indifferent to the negotiations, the Viscount takes a pinch of snuff and contemplates his own image in a looking‐glass hanging over a console table (the latter adorned with yet another coronet). In this scene, Hogarth appears to have based the figure of the Viscount on that of The Monkey who had seen the World, John Wootton’s illustration to Gay’s Fables, No. XIV, first published in 1727 (fig. 2), which had also inspired a poem by Jonathan Swift. Swift’s poem, Tim and the Fables, first published in 1728, describes how a beau called Tim who has ‘travelled’ (presumably on the Grand Tour) stares at his own image in the glass and is delighted to recognise there every feature of ‘the monkey who had seen the world’, though less pleased to read the conclusion of Gay’s fable.⁷⁸ The Viscount’s fashionable French dress suggests that he too has ‘travelled’, probably on the Grand Tour.

The Viscount, and his assumed ability to beget further aristocrats, is what his future father‐in‐law is buying. But the Alderman has failed to take account of the large black spot on the Viscount’s neck.⁷⁹ It might just pass for a beauty spot; but the black spot is Hogarth’s symbol for those who need to take the black mercurial pills which at the time were the only known treatment for venereal disease (see p. 164). Seen in conjunction with the Viscount’s Frenchified dress, the black spot may hint that he picked up venereal disease (which Englishmen liked to call ‘the French disease’) on his travels: there is no evidence to suggest that he inherited it from his [page 157]father, whose gout may be a side‐effect of rich living but is unconnected with the disease. The black spot will be the Viscount’s most conspicuous attribute throughout, though it will appear on others as well.

The bride is in her wedding finery, but not in a bridal mood (fig. 3). This marriage has been forced upon her by her father. She may be no more than sixteen or seventeen. Hogarth makes no attempt throughout the story to depict [page 158]her as intelligent; but he portrays her with his invariable response to youthfulness, bloom and health in women. Resisting any temptation to mock her attire, he lavishes his painterly skills on its delicate colours and soft textures in each scene she appears in. Here her dress has nuances of mother‐of‐pearl in its whiteness, and its gold trimmings lack the brazen quality of the Earl’s. An exquisite little knot of flowers on her lace cap is as restrainedly charming as those the still carefree girls wear in The Graham Children (see p. 135). But the bride feels anything but carefree. Distractedly, she shuttles a gold ring along the veil she will have to don for the ceremony. The Alderman’s black‐gowned lawyer takes advantage of his position in the background to lean familiarly over her. This is unlikely to be their first meeting. Horace Walpole observed that in Marriage A‐la‐Mode ‘an intrigue [is] carried on throughout the piece’.⁸⁰ If the girl and the lawyer are not already lovers, they soon will be. Since the lawyer has neither money nor breeding, the Alderman would never consent to his daughter marrying him. We learn later that the lawyer has the odd name of Silvertongue. Hogarth’s contemporaries would have recognised the allusion to the proverb: ‘A man that hath no money in his purse must have silver in his tongue.’ Silvertongue must rely on charm and wiles to keep the intrigue going. In this he succeeds, up to the penultimate scene. And the girl remains loyal to him throughout. It is to her credit that in this scene she is not swayed by the prospect of rank and riches.

The pictures in the room make their own comment on events. They are almost all copies of ‘dark old masters’ which connoisseurs of the day thought safe and Hogarth disliked, if only because they were eagerly purchased by ignoramuses who disdained the work of British artists. The pictures nearest to the bride evoke the sense of outrage she herself cannot express. Medusa (after Caravaggio),⁸¹ inset into a wall sconce hanging over the bride, sets the tone: screaming, with vipers writhing in her hair, she gives vent to rage: the bride may wish she could do the same. She may even feel that the martyrdoms depicted on Medusa’s right – Saint Lawrence (after Le Sueur)⁸² roasted over burning coals and Saint Agnes (after Domenichino),⁸³ whose martyrdom had included being forced to enter a brothel before having her throat cut – are as nothing compared to her own imminent fate. In Silvertongue’s corner, aggression largely takes over from martyrdom. To the left of his head, Cain slaying Abel (after Titian)⁸⁴ is a bad omen for the events of Scene 5, while above it Tityus and the Vulture (also after Titian)⁸⁵ hints at perpetual torment for seducers. On the window wall, David slaying Goliath (after Titian)⁸⁶ hangs above two smaller pictures. Hogarth may have invented the picture of Saint Sebastian knocked sideways by arrows to echo Silvertongue’s pose as he leans over the girl, sharpening his quill: presumably he is also sharpening plans for the continuation of their affair after her marriage. Guido Reni’s Judith with the Head of Holofernes⁸⁷ completes this group.

The largest painting of all, hanging by the window, is a portrait of Lord Squander himself in his younger days (fig. 4).⁸⁸ He is portrayed as half‐General, half‐Jupiter, in cuirass and fluttering sash, with a thunderbolt in his hand and wearing round his neck the Order of the Golden Fleece, an honour in fact awarded to no Englishman between Henry VIII and the Duke of Wellington;⁸⁹ well‐founded doubts about his right to wear this Order can only add to doubts about the authenticity of his family tree. In this portrait, Hogarth mocks the flamboyant style of French portraitists such as Hyacinthe Rigaud (1659–1743) and Nicolas de Largillière (1656–1746).⁹⁰ Hogarth had a wide knowledge of French art; and it is characteristic of him that even while mocking, he could himself learn something from such portraiture. As Frederick Antal observed in 1947, Hogarth’s portrait of the essentially English Captain Coram is largely derived from Drevet’s engraving (1729) of Rigaud’s portrait of the French financier Samuel Bernard.⁹¹ By contrast, Lord Squander’s portrait, as Gautier recognised, is ‘emphatically ridiculous’.⁹² Lord Squander himself does not appear after this scene. A painting on the ceiling depicts The Drowning of Pharaoh in the Red Sea (after Titian): as Cowley notes,⁹³ the imperious but doomed Pharaoh also wears a coronet.

A few years earlier, in a room seen from much the same angle, Hogarth had depicted The Strode Family decorously taking tea; but in that room, well‐stocked bookshelves stand against one wall and agreeable landscapes hang on the other. Both rooms in their different ways illustrate Horace Walpole’s observation that ‘the very furniture of his [Hogarth’s] rooms describe the characters of the persons to whom they belong’.⁹⁴ Books do not furnish any of the rooms in which the characters of Marriage A‐la‐Mode exist. Throughout its six scenes there is not a book in sight, apart from Hoyle on Whist (in Scene 2), the sanctimonious steward’s tract on Regeneration in the same scene, the published treatise of M. de la Pillule in Scene 3 and the erotic novel Le Sopha in Scene 4. The characters in Marriage A‐la‐Mode exist in a moral void, without literature, philosophy or religion to sustain them.

NG 114
Scene 2: The Tête à Tête

Some months after the marriage. The phrase ‘Tête à Tête’ implies a private conversation, with no third party present; in Dr Johnson’s Dictionary it is rendered as ‘cheek by jowl’. The scene is the double drawing‐room of (probably) the pseudo‐Palladian house we saw out of the window, completed with the Alderman’s money, as badly designed internally as externally,⁹⁵ and now occupied by the young couple. A Viscount’s coronet surmounts the chandelier;⁹⁶ the old Earl is thus presumably still alive, but he does not reappear, and the Viscount will soon succeed as the next Earl of Squander.

This whole scene is designed to confound contemporary expectations of what a conversation piece should be. Where Arthur Devis, for instance, portrays a decorously mannered couple like Mr and Mrs Dashwood in a sparsely but tastefully furnished room (fig. 5),⁹⁷ Hogarth portrays a husband and wife whose marriage is (and has always been) such a sham that each has reverted to type, snatching at whatever form of diversion each likes best; and the room which they unhappily co‐habit betrays all too clearly that they share no notions of presenting a common front to the outside world. The Squanderfields’ drawing‐room is a battleground for mute [page 160]antipathy between themselves and flagrant disharmony among their possessions.

A wall‐clock shows the time to be about 12.20pm, or shortly after noon. This was the fashionable hour to rise; but the Viscount has evidently just come home from an all‐night debauch. Now, in a pose defying all treatises on elegant deportment,⁹⁸ he sprawls in a chair, his gaze unfocused, his complexion pallid, his hair dishevelled under the hat he has forgotten to take off. A poodle⁹⁹ sniffing at his coat‐pocket detects one cause of the Viscount’s lassitude: a girl’s muslin cap. A similar cap hangs on the bed‐curtains in Hogarth’s scenes Before and After,¹⁰⁰ whose one‐word titles suffice to indicate the nature of the activities which take place in them. A second muslin cap wound round the hilt of the Viscount’s sword suggests that collecting such little feminine trophies is part of the night’s sport. A galant subject by Jean‐François de Troy of 1734 suggests that this was a French custom.¹⁰¹ It depicts a girl whose pose and dress are not comme il faut (she is en négligé, and careless of the fact that she is exposing an ankle) tying a newly purchased ribbon round the sword‐hilt of her lover. The Viscount’s sword lies on the floor, broken, but not in combat, for it is still in its scabbard. The broken sword may symbolise the Viscount’s impotence. He himself is too dazed to know or care how his weapon was broken. He is likely to pass out at any minute.

This image of the Viscount is probably the best‐known single figure in all Hogarth’s work. It drew the highest admiration from Gautier, who declared in 1868 (when Hogarth was chiefly known through engravings) that for this figure alone, Hogarth deserved fame as a painter. He particularly praised the modelling of the face (fig. 7), in which the painter had to retain the appearance of youth while showing the evidence of ‘nature’s revolt’ against dissipation.¹⁰² For the Viscount’s pose, Hogarth partly drew on a red chalk drawing by Charles‐Nicolas Cochin known as A Party of Revellers (fig. 6),¹⁰³ engraved in 1739, in which a man has fallen asleep, evidently after returning from a masquerade; a lady with a mask looks on, teasingly, while a painting behind them reveals Juno gazing adoringly as Endymion sleeps, making (rather more mildly) the sort of ironic pictorial juxtaposition which Hogarth makes throughout Marriage A‐la‐Mode.¹⁰⁴

Seated on the other side of a portable table¹⁰⁵ laid with breakfast for one, the Viscountess stretches, seemingly only half‐awake. Probably Hogarth knew Jonathan Swift’s poem The Journal of a Modern Lady, which includes the lines:
The modern dame is waked by noon,
Some authors say, not quite so soon;
Because, though sore against her will,
She sat up all night at quadrille.
She stretches, gapes, unglues her eyes,
And asks if it be time to rise…¹⁰⁶

But as the Viscountess stretches, there is nothing simple about her expression. A copy of Hoyle on Whist¹⁰⁷ near her feet and a scatter of playing cards under the arch are usually taken to mean that while her husband was out, his wife passed a harmless evening entertaining visitors to a card party. But it is unlikely that she ‘sat up all night at quadrille’; if visitors indeed came to play cards, one of them may have stayed on. In the left foreground, an overturned chair has not certainly been overturned in excitement over a game of whist. Two fiddles in cases – one case open, revealing the fiddle’s base and tailpiece – lie on top of each other in a manner which suggests sexual innuendo. A music book lying open over the chair is inscribed with a tune which is perfectly playable, but which has so far eluded all attempts at identification. It may be the tune of a song, perhaps popular in Vauxhall Gardens in 1742–3, whose words (if they survive) might aid interpretation.¹⁰⁸

With half‐closed eyes, the wife takes in the evidence of her husband’s debaucheries. They don’t seem to disconcert her; by now she is probably used to them. But everything [page 161] about this unlikely Viscountess suggests that she has a secret of her own which enables her to regard her husband with an air of sly triumph. The manner in which she thrusts her body forward as she stretches is usually taken to indicate that she is pregnant. If so, the child is probably her husband’s; but we cannot be sure that she is faithful to him. Several details strongly suggest that she is enjoying an affair of her own. It is likely to be with Silvertongue, who may have been with her late last night, and may still be concealed somewhere in the house. Painted (or carved) on the side of the chimney piece, just about level with her left cheek, is the head of a man, suggesting a third party in this marital tête à tête (fig. 8). It has previously escaped notice, probably because it is less conspicuous in the engraving. There is no matching head on the husband’s side of this otherwise symmetrical chimneypiece. Hogarth had already (and ironically) introduced a bust of William Kent into the right side of the chimneypiece in The Assembly at Wanstead House, 1730–1;¹⁰⁹ his capacity for allusion is virtually unlimited. Something is reflected in the small folding pocket‐mirror¹¹⁰ which the wife raises in her right hand; it is unlikely to be her tea‐cup. Can she be signalling to someone whom we do not see? The picture hanging high up in the further room suggests that something clandestine is or has been going on. Originally Hogarth painted a Madonna and Child within this frame (see Technical Notes);¹¹¹ but all that can now be seen in it is a large bare foot at an angle which indicates somebody lying down, and presumably engaged in an activity so indecent that the picture has to be largely concealed. The Viscountess’s pose – or perhaps both her pose and her husband’s – is likely to have inspired the still more indiscreet pose of the lady in La Lecture (fig. 9), by Pierre‐Antoine Baudoin (1723‐69), Boucher’s son‐in‐law, who exhibited small subjects of this sort at the Salon from about 1765.¹¹²

The unmistakable message of this scene as a whole is that the Squanderfields have bad taste. The badly proportioned chimneypiece itself is often said to be a satire on the designs of William Kent, the most fashionable interior designer of his day, whom Hogarth disliked; but it does not resemble any of Kent’s published designs, nor is there is anything particularly Kentian about the room.¹¹³ A cherub in the painting inset in the overmantel is playing (on the bagpipes) a popular song about once‐happy days when ‘all was love’;¹¹⁴ the phrase Oh happy groves, lettered on his music, serves to emphasise how far removed the home life of the Squanderfields is from ‘happy groves’. In his Analysis of Beauty, Hogarth noted that ‘Custom and fashion will, in length of time, reconcile almost every absurdity whatever to the eye’,¹¹⁵ instancing cherubs. ‘A painter’s representation of heaven would be nothing without swarms of these little inconsistent objects, flying about, or perching on the clouds’; in general they are so agreeable that the eye ‘overlooks the absurdity’, but a cherub playing a popular song on the bagpipes is near absurdity, and sets the tone for the whole ludicrous assemblage of objets d’art nearby.

On the mantelshelf, an antique female bust, broken at the neck and nose, recalls the busts of Cicero, Julia and Germanicus newly purchased by the Rake (and still bearing their sale lot numbers) in The Marriage Contract,¹¹⁶ the precursor of Scene 2 of A Rake’s Progress (and, to some extent, of Scenes 1 and 2 of Marriage A‐la‐Mode). The Squanderfields’ bust was no doubt acquired to parade some respect for classical antiquity; but they have placed it inappropriately in the centre of a collection of bogus chinoiseries: ‘squatting, round‐bellied, open‐mouthed orientals made in imitation, or rather in travesty, of Chinese images of Pu‐Tai, the god of happiness’.¹¹⁷ These were known as ‘pagods’, or pagoda figures, and were made in quantity in European porcelain factories to satisfy the ‘China‐mania’ of the 1740s. The writer John Shebbeare (1709–88) observed that in one room of every fashionable house ‘all the pagods and distorted animals of the east are piled up, and called the beautiful decorations of a chimney‐piece’.¹¹⁸ Hogarth, who considered the ‘pagods of China’ to be absolutely void of elegance,¹¹⁹ has piled them up on the Squanderfields’ mantelshelf, with a couple of baleful jade toads for good measure. Some bulbous glass completes the ensemble.

Next to the chimneypiece is a wall‐clock of extravagant fantasy, set in metallic foliage on which a cat perches, a fish swims and a Buddha squats, extruding a pair of twisted candle‐holders from his loins. Perhaps this represents a whim of one or other of the Squanderfields, but it was evidently designed by Hogarth in parody of highly elaborate French clocks of the period which incorporate porcelain (usually Meissen) flowers and figures.¹²⁰ In the further room, a slovenly footman who should be putting things to rights merely shambles about, yawning, still in his hair‐curlers. The three tall paintings are of Saints Matthew, Andrew and John the Evangelist, who would have been in happier company if the painted‐out ‘Madonna and Child’ had been left alone. No pictures have been painted in the lower four frames.

Exiting left, the steward of the household rolls his eyes towards heaven. With his Ledger under his arm and a stack of unpaid bills in his hand, he had come to ‘help’ his master; but his master is in no fit state to settle accounts. So the steward leaves, self‐righteously, with a tract lettered Regeneration (the title of one of the Revd George Whitefield’s most popular Methodist sermons¹²¹) sticking out of his coat pocket. Despite his minor role, the steward is unforgettable. His face and his demeanour exemplify the distinction which Hogarth drew between ‘characters’ and ‘caricaturas’, and which Hazlitt was to expand as ‘His [Hogarth’s] faces go to the very verge of caricature, and yet never … go beyond it… They exhibit the most uncommon features with the most uncommon expressions, but which are yet as familiar and intelligible as possible, because with all the boldness they have all the truth of nature.’¹²² Dangling from the steward’s little finger is a spike with a single piece of paper on it; this paper is inscribed Rec^d 1743, thus neatly recording the date of the painting itself.¹²³

NG 115
Scene 3: The Inspection

The scene is a doctor’s consulting room. The Viscount has evidently been here before. This time he is accompanied by a young girl. The manner in which the Viscount sits (sideways) on a chair at once suggests at least four things: that he is the principal patient; that the pill‐box placed near his groin contains pills previously prescribed for venereal disease; that the very young girl standing in the space between his outstretched legs is (at least temporarily) ‘his’ young girl; and that since he sits while she stands, she is decidedly his social inferior.

Brandishing his cane, the Viscount appears to be protesting that the doctor’s pills don’t work. They haven’t cured him; and now the young girl appears to be infected with the same disease. She too holds a pill‐box in one hand; with the other she dabs at what may be a syphilitic rash near her mouth. The Viscount lacks the imperiousness of the old Earl; he appears to be simultaneously blustering and entreating. His upraised cane may be an echo of the philosopher’s wand in Vandergucht’s illustration of The Pin and the Needle in one of Gay’s Fables of 1727; but the Viscount is in no sense a philosopher. Although he needs help, he is slow to realise that neither rank nor money can procure a speedy cure for his disease.

While it has long been recognised that this scene turns on the subject of venereal disease, the parts played by the individual characters in it have baffled previous commentators. At a time when every detail in Hogarth’s scenes was being scrutinised for meaning, Nichols and Steevens 1808 wrote of ‘no two persons having hitherto agreed in their explanation’ of this scene. Hazlitt called it ‘very obscure and enigmatical’; Davies 1959 thought that ‘Hogarth himself may have become lost among the details of the main theme and the subsidiary matter it pleased him to insert’, and subsequent writers have offered no very coherent explanations.¹²⁴ Davies’s question ‘Why, for instance, are there three pillboxes?’ surely overlooks the fact that here Hogarth is using a simple pictorial device of links in a chain of cause and effect: the box by the Viscount’s groin indicates the source of his disorder, the box he himself holds indicates his need for further treatment for his infection and the box the young girl holds suggests that through him, she too has become infected.

The pills themselves deserve attention. They are quite clearly black. The principal treatment for venereal disease at this time was a concoction of mercury, made up into pills.¹²⁵ Hogarth’s perfectly rounded black spots are the symbols of the perfectly rounded black (because their principal constituent was mercury) pills which some of his characters take because they are infected with the disease (a point already made on p. 156). Venereal disease was rife in this period, and easily caught. Most ‘cures’ had unpleasant side‐effects (‘Two minutes with Venus: two years with mercury’¹²⁶ was a lesson many learnt painfully), and not all were effective. Doctors all over London openly advertised their pills for this ‘disorder’, usually on the back pages of newspapers.

The doctor polishes his spectacles on a handkerchief which by no means inspires confidence in his attention to hygiene. He has generally been assumed to be a figure of fun, made laughably ugly to undermine his pretensions and to show that he is a ‘quack doctor’. This scene was for long known as ‘The Visit to the Quack Doctor’; but Hogarth himself did not call it that. The most noticeable thing about the doctor is that he himself is riddled with venereal disease (fig. 10). This has escaped the notice of art historians, but not that of medical men. The doctor’s ‘dish face’, and particularly the sunken bridge of his nose, his bulging forehead, thick lips and probable toothlessness, are characteristics of the ‘bulldog facies’ of an advanced degree of congenital syphilis (such as Gérard de Lairesse reveals in his Self Portrait of c. 1675,¹²⁷ fig. 11); his deformed legs, bowed or ‘sabred’, also indicate congenital syphilis.¹²⁸ While Hogarth has undoubtedly based this figure on direct observation, William Schupbach makes the interesting suggestion¹²⁹ that Hogarth may also have had in mind the two diseased men in Raphael’s cartoon The Healing of the Lame Man;¹³⁰ the doctor’s face resembles that of the lame man (and through his father‐in‐law James Thornhill’s copies of them, Hogarth knew the Raphael Cartoons well).¹³¹ On a table beside the doctor is a human skull, not in itself a surprising object for a medical man to keep, perhaps for demonstration purposes. But this skull is riddled with small black holes which indicate syphilitic erosions.¹³² The long and not always helpful anonymous poem ‘in Hudibrastic verse’ written in 1746 about the six scenes is at least to the point on the subject of the skull:
And tho’ it was extremely thick
The p‐x ten holes did in it pick.There is also a virago in the room, and a positively threatening one. Her dress is too gaudy to be ladylike; but she was once a fine figure of a woman, and is still quite handsome, despite two tell‐tale black spots on her face (every human being in this room, as well as the once‐human skull, is infected to some degree with venereal disease). Even more tell‐tale is the tattoo FC above her left breast, said to have been inflicted on convicted prostitutes (the letters are now difficult to see in the painting, but are fairly clear in the engraving).¹³³ As the Viscount brandishes his cane, she is ready with a weapon of her own: a vicious‐looking knife of the type which might be used in a doctor’s surgery for blood‐letting.

The woman’s seeming fury and her relationship (if any) to the other three people in this room have puzzled previous commentators. She has been variously supposed to be the doctor’s mistress, indignant at criticism of the efficacy of his pills, and/or the manageress of the establishment’s sideline, who has procured the young girl for the Viscount and now appears to be furious that one of her girls should have been brought back infected with his disease.

She may well be both these things: but if one looks at the painting rather than the engraving of this scene, colour is a positive aid to interpretation. Hogarth has provided an unmistakable clue to the fact that the relationship between the furious woman and the seemingly helpless young girl is one of mother and daughter. The girl’s skirt is of an unusual brocade, patterned with red flowers on a gold background. The woman’s sleeves are of exactly the same material,¹³⁴ suggesting that she has used remnants of an old gown to make a skirt for her daughter and a bodice for herself. Hogarth’s attention to detail was meticulous; he would never have repeated the same fabric on two figures in the same scene if he had not wanted to inform us of a close domestic relationship between the two people. There is a further implication of ‘Like mother, like daughter’, an adage as old as the Book of Ezekiel,¹³⁵ the girl is already following her mother’s career. That a mother should put her young daughter out to prostitution was all too common in this period. In his capacity as a magistrate, Fielding observed that many prostitutes were ‘under the age of eighteen, many not more than twelve, and these, though young, half eaten up with the foul Distemper’.¹³⁶ The Viscount is unlikely to be the girl’s first client. Who gave [page 165]her the pox – if indeed she has the pox and is not just acting, like her mother – cannot be certain; but it looks as if this may not be a pathetic scene of innocence wronged but a carefully rehearsed scene in which the Viscount will end up paying handsome damages for uncertain responsibility.

This scene is full of extraordinary objects; it takes time to realise that they represent fairly random fields of enquiry rather than true learning. Some unpleasant‐looking iron machinery on the right immediately arouses the sort of apprehension commonly felt on entering a doctor’s surgery; the pulleys above do nothing to allay it. The title‐page of an open volume ‐ EXPLICATION / DE DEUX MACHINES SUPERBES: L’UN POUR REMETTRE/ LES EPAULES / L’AUTRE POUR SERVIR DE TIRE‐BOUCHON ‐ tells us that one of these machines is for setting shoulders; the other is for drawing corks. The title‐page also informs us that the machines are the invention of MONS^R DE LA PILLULE, and that both have been approved by the Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris. Facing the title‐page is an engraved portrait of M. de la Pillule,¹³⁷ the author and inventor: presumably a portrait of this doctor, in better days. William Schupbach’s research¹³⁸ suggests that here Hogarth may be only mildly satirical at the expense of the doctor’s inventions; he may have known the magnificent volumes which summarise and illustrate the vast variety of machines and inventions approved by the Académie Royale des Sciences in Paris.

The evidence in the room suggests that the doctor practises simultaneously as physician, surgeon, barber‐surgeon, apothecary and chemist. An open door on the right offers a glimpse of his distilling room.¹³⁹ Shelves against the left wall are lined with jars containing drugs, identified by labels; beneath them are drawers of herbs used to make up the drugs. So far, these are standard equipment. Beyond the shelves are two pictures of lusus naturae, commonly known as freaks: one is a man with his head growing below his shoulders, the other appears to be a double‐headed hermaphrodite. Below them are the squat shapes of two painted mummy cases, of dubious medicinal value,¹⁴⁰ but sought after by collectors in the 1740s.

If the objects on the left wall are odd, those on the end wall are bizarre. A handsome cabinet, of the type used by more erudite collectors as a cabinet of curiosities, occupies most of the wall. Slung from it, on the left, is the horn of a narwhal (Monodon monoceros), about five feet long.¹⁴¹ On top of the cabinet and on the wall beyond it are ranged – more or less in this order – a pile of bricks (perhaps to be heated to allay pain);¹⁴² a barber’s shaving bowl; a conspicuously large urine flask; a head of the sort which might hang outside an apothecary’s shop, with a pill in its movable jaw; a giant’s femur, hanging behind it; a small (but significant) tripod; an ivory comb, perhaps Eskimo (or Lapp); a tall hat, possibly North American, and a pair of moccasins; an outsize spur, with a stuffed reptile below it; an ancient long‐handled sword and buckler; and a dark picture of a malformed child. Presiding over all this is a stuffed crocodile which has produced an ostrich egg. A crocodile volant is a time‐honoured ingredient in pictures of alchemists.¹⁴³

Many of these strange objects could be matched in the ‘cabinets of curiosities’ formed by men far more eminent than this doctor.¹⁴⁴ Dr Richard Mead, physician to George II and one of the most learned men of his day, had several ‘walnut tree cabinets’ full of curious items; it took a five‐day sale to disperse them.¹⁴⁵ He owned ‘an Egyptian mummy, well preserved, with its original coffin’, numerous ‘serpents [pickled] in glasses’, ‘a monstrous embryo of a hog with 8 legs’, a crocodile or two and a narwhal horn six‐and‐a‐half feet long, as well as an even greater curiosity, the double horn of a rhinoceros. But as a connoisseur, Dr Mead owned things of beauty which this doctor could never aspire to: antique sculpture, carved gems and two paintings by Watteau, his patient in 1719.¹⁴⁶ Hogarth respected Dr Mead, knew his collection and would have had no wish to make fun of it; but he may have picked out some of the more commonplace objects in it to furnish this room. Acquired by those with true intellectual curiosity, ‘curiosities’ served as reminders that knowledge was not finite, and held out to enquiring minds possibilities for comparative studies based on informed research. But for such study, a well‐stocked library was essential. That is what this doctor most conspicuously lacks. A truly learned physician would have had shelves full of books; here, apart from the doctor’s own treatise, there are none.

One of the cabinet doors has swung open, to reveal a skeleton, an écorché (the sculpted figure of a man whose muscles and tendons are exposed as if the covering skin had been removed) and a periwig on a wig‐maker’s block and [page 166] pole (fig. 12). A skeleton and an écorché figure can each be of value for teaching purposes, and were often found in anatomy theatres (‘a skeleton in one niche and an écorché in an answering niche’¹⁴⁷). But something more surreal is going on here. The skeleton is making advances to the écorché, one bony hand between its legs; the écorché, open‐eyed and with far more expression in its face than such a figure would normally have, seems uncertain how to respond.¹⁴⁸ The tripod (mentioned above) seems to be placed directly over the écorché’s head. It serves as an omen of the three‐sided gallows‐tree whose shadow is to loom over the last scene, and perhaps as a clue to the écorché’s own fate; the only corpses which anatomists could lawfully obtain were those of executed criminals. The shadowy face on the wig‐block¹⁴⁹ seems to watch not only what is going on in the cabinet but the goings‐on in the room itself. This face is traditionally thought to represent the late Dr John Misaubin, who died in 1734. In his house in St Martin’s Lane (not far from Slaughter’s Coffee‐House), Dr Misaubin had specialised in pills for the treatment of venereal disease; Watteau had drawn a caricature‐sketch of him, complete with his long wig (engraved by Arthur Pond in 1739 with the caption Prenez des Pilules¹⁵⁰), and Henry Fielding dedicated his play The Mock Doctor (first performed in 1732) to Dr Misaubin, for ‘that Little Pill’ which had rendered him ‘so great a blessing to mankind’.¹⁵¹ The long wig on the wig‐block seems to be in his style, and although the shadowy face does not resemble that in Hogarth’s pen and ink sketch of Dr Misaubin and Dr Ward nor in Louis Goupy’s gouache of Dr Misaubin and his Wife,¹⁵² Dr Misaubin’s ghostly presence in this room might be considered appropriate to the sort of consultations which evidently frequently take place in it.

NG 116
Scene 4: The Toilette

This scene takes place in the young Countess of Squander’s bedroom; an Earl’s coronet over her bed informs us that the old Earl must recently have died, and the young couple have lost no time in displaying evidence of their new rank. Like the front drawing‐room in their house, the Countess’s bedroom is painted olive‐green, a colour much in vogue from about 1730,¹⁵³ but one which makes her pink bed hangings look distinctly vulgar. Another coronet surmounts the silver‐framed looking‐glass which stands on the Countess’s dressing‐table.

The Countess is following the fashion set by the French court and aped by the London beau monde of receiving visitors during the concluding stages of the toilette which follows her levée: that is, she has got up, and is now half‐dressed (en déshabille), and is sufficiently presentable to receive visitors. The word toilette originally meant the little toile or piece of linen draped over the shoulders (as over the Countess’s) while the hair was being dressed. By the 1740s, its meaning was extended to include the ritual of receiving visitors while completing one’s dressing.¹⁵⁴ A toilette could also mean the ‘toilet set’ of silver brushes, tweezers, wig‐powder shakers and boxes of paints, powders, patches and pomatums. The Countess’s silver toilet set, in which the coroneted looking‐glass is the chief piece, is comparatively simple, though probably costly; it could have been made by one of the leading goldsmiths of the day, such as Paul de Lamerie.¹⁵⁵ Some ladies needed a formidable battery of cosmetics, perfumes and unguents and several hours with which to make themselves up. Jonathan Swift’s scabrous lines on The Lady’s Dressing Room begin:
Five hours, (and who can do it less in?)
By haughty Celia spent in dressing…and describes:
Gallipots and vials placed,
Some filled with washes, some with paste;
Some with pomatum, paints and slops,
And ointments good for scabby chops…¹⁵⁶But the Countess still has youth on her side, and what Gautier calls ‘a certain plebeian freshness’;¹⁵⁷ she can present herself in less than five hours. However foolishly she behaves, Hogarth continues to portray her in delicate colours. Here she wears a soft yellow wrapper over a pale lavender underskirt, with a blue bow on her bodice such as Chardin might have added; and as Hazlitt observed, Hogarth arranges the [page 168]curl‐papers around her head ‘almost like a wreath of half‐blown flowers’.¹⁵⁸ As her French hairdresser tests the heat of his curling‐tongs on paper, a little puff of smoke arises. While the Countess awaits his attentions, she leans an arm over the back of her chair; and we see a baby’s teething‐coral hanging from a red ribbon over it,¹⁵⁹ indicating that she is now a mother, and sees her child occasionally, though it does not appear until the last scene. It does not of course occur to the Countess to meditate upon her reflection in the glass, as more thoughtful ladies do in vanitas paintings.¹⁶⁰ She has eyes only for Silvertongue, who is now evidently openly admitted to the house, and demonstrates his privileges and his lack of manners by putting his feet up on the sofa.

While Silvertongue continues his intrigue with the Countess, she has arranged a diversion for her visitors: a recital by an Italian singer whose beringed fingers, jewelled pendant, extravagantly curled wig and earrings indicate that he is a castrato (fig. 13). He has been variously identified as Farinelli, Carestini (in fact not a castrato but a counter‐tenor) or Senesino, each of whom had sung for several seasons in London opera houses during the previous decade.¹⁶¹ All three had been idolised by audiences, but had returned to Italy by mid‐1740; but others arrived to sing their roles, Handel’s operas alone demanding castrati. The porcine features of Hogarth’s castrato are closest to those of Senesino in engravings after Thomas Hudson and Joseph Goupy;¹⁶² but it is unlikely that Hogarth would have included a specific portrait of one individual in this series of invented characters; still more unlikely that either Farinelli, Carestini or Senesino would have deigned to sing at the Squanders’ when they could command colossal fees in Covent Garden or the King’s Theatre. Farinelli would not allow any of his singers to take outside engagements that would tire their voices. This castrato is probably a generalised portrait of the sort of ‘foreigner’ who (to Hogarth’s disgust, as expressed in his engraving Masquerades and Operas of 1724) took London by storm. The singer has evidently brought his own accompanist with him, a vaguely Watteauesque flautist who adds yet another fashionably ‘foreign’ note to the scene.

A black manservant offers cups of chocolate while the castrato warbles on. Only two people in the room appear to be listening to him. One, a woman in white, falls into a pantomime of rapture. The other, a man with a fan attached to his wrist, has the face of a toady, not improved by a black spot on his lower lip. Behind him, another man is frankly dozing. A spindle‐shanked, effeminate man sips chocolate with an abstracted air; his hair is still in curl papers (grotesquely horn‐shaped), which suggests he is an habitué of the house, perhaps as a dancing‐master, and is thus permitted to ‘go about with it all morning in papers, and dress it out in the afternoon’.¹⁶³ The line‐up against this wall is thus a castrated man (the singer), an elderly man (the flautist), an effeminate man, a likely homosexual (if wearing a fan is properly interpreted to indicate homosexuality) and a man who is frankly asleep. Silvertongue’s portrait hanging above them (and above The Rape of Ganymede, also hinting at homosexuality) shows a man whose appearance is by contrast notably commonplace; but his uncomplicated masculinity is perhaps just what attracts the Countess. The only other active man in the room is the black man serving chocolate, who laughs at ‘the nature of the white society he serves’.¹⁶⁴

The Countess’s present visitors do not appear to have quite the same social cachet as those new acquaintances whose cards lie in a careless scatter in the foreground on the left: Count Basset (who takes his name from a card game, but who is evidently either illiterate or a foreigner) beg to no how Lade Squander Sleapt last nite; Lady Heathan invites her to a Drum major ‘next Sunday’ (as only a ‘Heathan’ would), Miss Hairbrain to a Rout, Lady Townly to a Drum on Monday.¹⁶⁵ There are echoes here from Henry Fielding’s play The Modern Husband, first performed in 1731: Mrs. Modern’s engagement book reads ‘Monday… at Mrs. Squabble’s; Tuesday, at Mrs. Witless’s; Wednesday, at Lady Matadore’s; Thursday, at Mrs. Fiddlefaddle’s; Friday, at Mrs. Ruin’s; Saturday, at Lady Trifle’s; Sunday, at Lady Barbara Pawnjewel’s’.¹⁶⁶

As further evidence of the Countess’s own bad taste, her latest purchases have been spread out before her. Still bearing their lot numbers, they have come from a sale whose catalogue lies on the floor (lettered A CATALOGUE / of the / Entire [page 169]Collection / of the Late S^r Tim^y Babyhouse/ to be sold / by Auction). Attending auction sales and being seen to bid recklessly demonstrated not only wealth but also the fashionable qualities of whim and caprice. The Countess’s latest purchases are lined up as a parade of folly on the floor: more ‘pagods’, toads and grotesqueries and, in a basket, a silver platter embossed with a design of Leda and the Swan (yet another image of sexual encounter in disguise), inscribed Iulio Romano. The Countess may have taken a perverse pleasure in securing Lot 1000, a figure of Actaeon, whose horns can appropriately enough represent a cuckold, such as she has proved her husband to be. This image of the absent master of the house is causing the small black page some merriment.

As usual, paintings on the walls add point and counterpoint to the story. Immediately behind the castrato is a version of Michelangelo’s Rape of Ganymede; in Hogarth’s version, the beak of the eagle (Jupiter in disguise, pouncing on a handsome boy) is dangerously lowered, as if one quick snap will result in castration if Ganymede resists. Above Jupiter hangs a recent portrait of Silvertongue, proof of his continuing advance in the Countess’s favours. On the wall behind the Countess’s dressing table hang two utterly different images of sexual encounter: Io in ecstasy in the embrace of Jupiter thinly disguised by a cloud in the shape of a bear, after Correggio, side by side with Lot’s daughters making their father drunk so that he will sleep with them and thus perpetuate the human race, after (?) Caravaggio.¹⁶⁷ Perhaps the contrast is between sex as delight and sex as duty; but it is doubtful whether the Countess herself draws any conclusion from this contrast.

Turning her back on the singer and on her visitors, the Countess listens only to Silvertongue. As if his attitude were not enough to inform us that his mind is not on the castrato, Hogarth tucks behind Silvertongue’s feet a copy of Le Sopha, a collection by Crébillon fils of erotic tales reflecting the moral depravity of the day, and consequently a best‐seller:¹⁶⁸ it was translated into English and published in London in 1742. Silvertongue takes advantage of the music to put a proposition to the Countess. With one hand he offers her a ticket for a masquerade: it is inscribed 1 Door 2^d Door 3^d Do.., and we understand that if she can make her way to the masquerade, he will meet her inside. He gestures with his other hand towards a painted screen, on which Hogarth has depicted a masquerade in progress. In a large room lit by chandeliers, men and women wearing masks and disguises mingle more freely than they could do with propriety at a formal ball. Silvertongue indicates one of the foreground figures: it is a man dressed as a friar, conversing with a woman dressed as a nun. Unlike Jupiter, who in this room alone is seen ingeniously disguised as an eagle, a bear and a swan, Silvertongue is not imaginative. The commonest disguises worn at masquerades were the loose‐fitting costumes (or dominoes) of ‘friars’ and ‘nuns’, which could be readily hired and worn over one’s own clothes, and that is how he proposes that he and the Countess should go to the masquerade. Henry Morland’s painting, first exhibited in 1769 as A Lady in a Masquerade Habit and quickly popular as an engraving entitled The Fair Nun Unmask’d,¹⁶⁹ depicts a ‘nun’ who has discarded her habit (except for a veil) but still toys with a mask similar to those lying on the floor in Hogarth’s next scene.

Masquerades had become increasingly popular from the early eighteenth century, though frequently denounced as encouraging immoral behaviour.¹⁷⁰ Probably the most fashionable masquerades in Hogarth’s day were those held in the Long Room which formed part of the King’s Theatre in the Haymarket. To boost the theatre’s revenues, the Swiss impresario Count John James Heidegger, its manager from 1708, staged masquerades there.¹⁷¹ As many as 700 people might attend a masquerade in the Haymarket, giving an illusion of a congress of ‘Turks, Italians, Indians, Polanders, Venetians, &c .’, but all masked. A Masquerade at the King’s Theatre in the Haymarket, one of several such subjects by Giuseppe Grisoni,¹⁷² probably painted about 1724, shows a masquerade in full swing (fig. 14). Champagne and other wines were continually available from buffets at either side of the room. Supper was served at 11pm, ‘the whole diversion continuing from nine o’clock till seven the next morning’.¹⁷³

In the small space available to him on a painted screen in Scene 4, Hogarth suggests the attractions of a masquerade. In earlier engravings, he had been more savage. In Masquerades and Operas (or The Bad Taste of the Town), published in 1724,¹⁷⁴ he had charged Heidegger with debasing ‘the English Stage’. His Masquerade Ticket, published in 1727,¹⁷⁵ includes an altar to Priapus on the left, and on the right an altar to Venus. A pair of long‐case ‘lecherometers’ measure sexual appetites. Heidegger’s bewigged head appears on the clock’s face: its pendulum, inscribed Nonsense, moves incessantly, registering Impertinence every minute and Wit only once an hour. Since Heidegger was the subject of his particular dislike, Hogarth is likely to have had the King’s Theatre in the Haymarket in mind when sending Silvertongue and the Countess off to a masquerade.

NG 117
Scene 5: The Bagnio

The anglicised word bagnio is derived from the Italian bagno, a bath or bathing‐house. Probably the earliest bagnio in London was in Newgate Street, where John Aubrey notes that Turkish merchants established Turkish baths in 1679; others were soon opened, mostly operating – often under the sign of The Turk’s Head – as Turkish baths with a coffee‐house attached.¹⁷⁶ While some bagnios were perfectly respectable establishments, others became known as houses of ill repute. ‘Carry her to a Bagnio, and there you may lodge with her’, says Frankly to an eager lover in Benjamin Hoadly’s play The Suspicious Husband, 1747.¹⁷⁷ In Night, one of The Four Times of the Day painted in about 1736 and engraved in 1738,¹⁷⁸ Hogarth depicts the outside of two such dubious houses near Charing Cross; on one side of the street a sign is hung out reading Bagnio, on the other The New Bagnio.

Scene 5 is set at night and by firelight. A crumpled bill lying on the floor (payment here is probably strictly in advance) is headed The Bagnio, with a picture of a Turk’s head on it. The chief piece of furniture is a bed. Two gate‐leg tables by the wall suggest that the room can also be hired for gambling; but tonight they are folded. Off‐stage to the left, a fire must be burning low; we see only the long, slanting shadows cast by firelight.

Silvertongue and the Countess have come on from the masquerade to spend the night here. They have peeled off their dominoes and thrown aside their masks. The Countess’s hooped underskirt lies like a half‐collapsed Chinese paper lantern on the floor, beside her ‘bearded lady’ mask (with its frill to disguise the mouth) and her fashionable shoes with their upturned toes. She has tossed off her whaleboned stays (objects which had some fascination for Hogarth¹⁷⁹) with such abandon as to overturn a chair; they fall across a bundle of faggots, plausibly there as firewood, but in addition recalling that a ‘faggot’ was a low term for a harlot. The firelight is brightest in this corner, casting coppery light and low shadows over this bizarre still life, which ends, in the far left, with a pair of crossed sticks, the upper one red‐hot at one end; hidden meanings are likely here, as well as the most obvious one that the situation is potentially disastrous (‘Kindle not a fire that you cannot extinguish’ is a proverb already old in Hogarth’s day¹⁸⁰). The bed is rumpled, and the candle has burnt low; but how long Silvertongue and the Countess have spent in the room is uncertain.

Their plans for a night of bliss in the bagnio have miscarried. The Earl himself has burst into the room. It was probably he who broke the door lock off its hinges (it now lies on the floor). How he reached this room is uncertain. It is usually suggested that he followed Silvertongue and the Countess from the masquerade, bent on revenge, and challenged Silvertongue to a duel. But such positive, premeditated action would be out of character. It is just as likely – perhaps more likely, given the evidence of the Earl’s nocturnal habits in Scene 2 – that this bagnio was one of his regular ports of call, and that some ‘friend’ tipped him the wink that his wife was in the next room. Such a scenario would be more in keeping with farces of the day. But this scene is not a farce. Things have gone seriously wrong, and will get worse. Perhaps he burst in with his sword already drawn, hoping to frighten Silvertongue or ‘give him a lesson’ (we saw him in Scene 3 brandishing his cane towards the doctor as if to exert his authority). But Silvertongue, again showing that capacity for effective action which the Earl lacks, reached for his own sword and used it first, and to fatal effect. This surprise encounter is usually described as a duel, but wrongly: duels were arranged by protocol, requiring formal challenge, acceptance and the presence of seconds. Silvertongue’s sword now lies near the Countess’s hoops, stained with the Earl’s blood. The Earl, who may well have drunk pretty deeply before having the courage to rush in to a confrontation, may have had no time to wield his sword before being fatally stabbed. Now it has dropped to the floor and become fixed there, point downwards, as impotent in action as the Earl himself has always been.¹⁸¹

The Countess falls on one knee beside the Earl, her hands clasped, two distinct tears glistening on her cheek.¹⁸² Just what emotions possess her at this moment is impossible to say: perhaps a mixture of shock, horror, remorse and fear for her own future. Of all the six scenes, this one was the least carefully worked out in advance. The Technical Notes above (pp. 149–50) should be closely studied here. They show that during the painting process major alterations were made and are visible in X‐rays and in an infra‐red reflectogram.¹⁸³ Hogarth appears to have changed his mind completely over the part the Countess plays in the scene. Originally he depicted the figure of a loosely clad woman hurrying off to the left edge of the scene, seemingly aghast, and clutching a sword diagonally across her body, its hilt by her face;¹⁸⁴ this figure was presumably Hogarth’s first idea for the Countess, fleeing with the evidence of Silvertongue’s guilt. He then painted out that figure, and placed the Countess kneeling at her husband’s feet.

Hogarth’s own indecision about how to stage this scene communicates itself to us: we are uncertain about how to react to it. Although the narrative line concerns death, desertion and despair, there are too many burlesque elements for us to feel true concern for any of the characters. That may of course be precisely what Hogarth intended. On one level, the Countess kneeling before the dying Earl suggests remorse. On another level, it is pure theatrical parody: in innumerable plays and operas, the wife/daughter kneels before her husband/father, clasping her hands to beg forgiveness, protest her innocence or just gain time while a lover hides in a laundry basket.¹⁸⁵ In Hogarth’s own paintings of The Beggar’s Opera (first staged in the Lincoln’s Inn Theatre in 1728), Polly Peachum kneels before her father and Lucy Lockit before hers, both hoping to save Macheath from hanging.¹⁸⁶

But if the Countess’s attitude is a theatrical cliché, the Earl’s situation is more serious. Whether or not the Countess fully realises it, he has received a mortal wound. Hogarth depicts him in a slow dying fall, his long ungainly legs just beginning to cave in. Hazlitt observed that the Earl’s pose is ‘one in which it would be impossible for him to stand or even to fall’.¹⁸⁷ There is probably an element of theatrical parody of actors or opera singers who took a long time in ‘dying’ here, as well as in the Countess’s pose. It has been suggested that the Earl’s pose ‘can only be an echo, and a conscious one, of a Descent from the Cross’,¹⁸⁸ with the Countess in the pose of a Mary Magdalen, and the night watchman’s lantern throwing the shadow of a cross on the door. If Hogarth borrowed ideas for the collapsing body of the Earl from some (unspecified) representation of the deposition of Christ’s body from the cross, the Earl’s own habitual physical awkwardness and the sheer theatricality of the pose are also elements in the result Hogarth achieved. As the Earl falls, his head is seen within the frame of what is probably a looking‐glass, perhaps to remind us that on his first appearance in Scene 1, the young man was idly contemplating his own image.¹⁸⁹ As death overtakes the Earl, the black spot on his neck is as conspicuous as ever.

An enigmatic shadow is thrown by firelight on the floor in the foreground (fig. 16). It is ostensibly the shadow of an ordinary pair of firetongs, which must be hanging up out of sight to our left (Hogarth even includes the shadow of the hook on which they hang). This shadow is very deliberately introduced; equally deliberately, Silvertongue’s blood‐stained sword is painted lying over the shadow, as if thrusting through it. The shadow is perhaps the schematic image of the long‐legged man who is collapsing to the floor as we watch. The sword which mortally wounded him in the breast now lies, deeply stained with his blood, as if piercing the shadow through the groin. The sword alone has been able to ‘cure’ Lord Squander’s venereal disease, at the cost of death. But there is probably a double meaning. In contemporary slang (then and now), a man’s penis is his ‘weapon’. Silver‐tongue’s ‘weapon’ has reduced what is almost certainly the last of the Squanders to a shadow.

Predictably, the pictures on the walls are a bizarre assortment. A tapestry of The Judgement of Solomon hangs on the back wall, and a painting of Saint Luke with his ox and ass above the door. Near the window hangs a wicked parody of the sort of ‘Portrait of a Lady as a Shepherdess’ painted by the fashionable portraitist Thomas Hudson, Hogarth’s near contemporary:¹⁹⁰ but this is the ‘Portrait of a Harlot’, who may have dressed for the masquerade as a shepherdess in a tilted hat, but who holds a squirrel (contemporary slang for a harlot) perched on one hand and, with the other, dangles the handle of (?) a parasol below her waist; since her portrait is hung over another picture in which we see only a man’s legs, the implications are lewd. The oddly angled gaze of the painted ‘Lady’ appears to be fixed upon the ‘penitent’ Countess, as if to suggest that they are each as bad as the other. The legs of the man in the lower picture are in buskins; otherwise, what we see of them (which is only from the knees down, the position of the right leg corrected by Hogarth) echoes the pose (in tartan socks) of Samuel McPherson Corporal in his Highland Regimentals; shot for desertion in July 1743, he was the subject of a popular engraving published the following month.¹⁹¹ If the legs are indeed intended to echo those of the deserter, they are appropriately placed near the naked legs of Silvertongue, who is deserting the Countess.

A candle flame below the double picture veers wildly between the draughts from the open window and the open door. The proprietor of the Turk’s Head, having heard a commotion, has come to investigate its cause. For his figure, simultaneously advancing and recoiling at what he sees, Hogarth draws on the pose of the doctor in one of Watteau’s Commedia dell'Arte scenes, engraved by C.‐N. Cochin in 1729 with lines which begin ‘Belle n’écoutez rien, Arlequin est un traitre...’ (‘Beautiful girl, do not listen to Harlequin, for he is a deceiver…’), advice which in this case is sound, but too late.¹⁹² The proprietor has summoned a constable, who carries his staff of office, and the night watchman, who holds his lantern high, its bars casting the shadow of a cross on the door, its pattern of holes at the top throwing pools of reflected light up to the ceiling. These three advance through the open door. Silvertongue has not a moment to lose; with one quick backward glance he makes what he hopes is his escape through the open window (fig. 15). In his nightshirt, and once the alarm is raised, he will not long escape arrest. Hogarth’s handling of this episode is restrained in comparison with that of John Collett (1725–80), his occasional plagiarist. In an engraving published in 1781 with the title Fielding’s Myrmidons spoiling Bob Booty’s Morning Draught (Stephens 1977, cat. no. 5947), Collett used the elements of Hogarth’s scene, adding a man with two girls in bed and the legs of another (presumably drunken) man beneath it; he retained the stays and mask on the floor, the watch entering through the door and the overturned chair. One crude painting on the wall is presumably included in imitation of Hogarth.

NG 118
Scene 6: The Lady’s Death

In contrast to the first scene, which was set in the sumptuous house of a spendthrift, the last scene is set in the frugal house of a penny‐pincher. The wretched Countess, dogged by the scandal following Silvertongue’s arrest, trial and sentence to death for the murder of her husband, has returned to the house of her father the Alderman. A newly printed broadsheet lettered Counseller Silvertou…/ last dying Speech… lies at her feet. On it is the image of Tyburn’s ‘triple tree’, the three‐sided gallows foreshadowed by the tripod in Scene 3. Like the idle apprentice finally meeting retribution in the penultimate scene in Industry and Idleness, Hogarth’s longest ‘modern moral history’ (engraved from drawings and published as a series of twelve plates in 1747),¹⁹³ Silvertongue will have been taken in a cart to Tyburn, but before being hanged from the triple tree which looms ahead, he will have been exhorted by a preacher to make a last speech from the scaffold professing repentance. The last speeches of condemned men, usually with macabre woodcut illustrations, were widely popular as reading‐matter. The broadsheet is probably by now on sale all over town.

With Silvertongue dead, the Countess thought only of suicide. She has drunk laudanum, probably the entire contents of the bottle now lying empty on the floor. Death appears to have come swiftly. She may not even have thought of her child, but an old nurse lifts a child of about two years old to kiss his or her mother. Whether the child is a girl or boy is left ambiguous (boys were dressed in long skirts until they were ‘breeched’ at about eight years old). What is all too clear is that the child has congenital syphilis to an advanced degree. The black spot on its cheek and the sunken bridge of its nose are enough to indicate that; but as the child is lifted, we see also its pitiful legs, deformed by the disease (like the doctor’s, in Scene 3), and encased in surgical boots and braces. The black spot on the cheek may suggest that this is the Earl’s child; but the Earl will have passed on the infection to his wife, and the child’s parentage remains in question. This group of mother, nurse and child parodies the final scene in many a novel of virtue rewarded. Above all, it is a parody of Samuel Richardson’s novel Pamela (then much‐acclaimed, but to many – including Fielding – tedious¹⁹⁴) which Hogarth had been invited to illustrate, though not finally employed to [page 174]do so. Gravelot’s illustration of the virtuous Pamela who, after strenuously defending her honour through many trials, is rewarded at the end by marriage and a bouncing baby (‘Billy is brought into my Presence, all smiling…’), is reproduced here (fig. 17). The Countess has not been so careful, nor so lucky. The child, an innocent in this story, has not been lucky at all. It is unlikely to survive long.

Suicides’ chattels were forfeit; prudently, the Alderman removes a ring from his daughter’s hand. In grabbing her arm to do so, he denies her her last chance to return her child’s embrace. The Alderman is dressed exactly as he was in Scene 1; he was never a man of fashion. Nor is he a man of taste. The pictures in his house are all of the Dutch lowlife school: pictures with broad bourgeois jokes, such as a man urinating against a wall (near the clock), a ham skewered by a rapier in the pile‐up of food next to it, or a drunkard lighting his pipe at another’s nose (on the left).

The room is sparsely furnished; it contains little of comfort, and the boards are bare. A plain old‐fashioned clock hangs on the wall. The Alderman does not spend money on whims. His wealth is not displayed; but we can be sure that it is measured and accounted for, down to the last groat. He has unlocked the door of a corner cupboard, presumably to stow away his daughter’s ring; in it we see his ledgers, his most important possessions. Even within the cupboard, the ledgers are turned back to front.

The Alderman’s civic gown and hat hang by the clock, and a silver punch bowl lends a solitary note of splendour to the table ‐ but that was probably presented to him after a period of office rather than purchased by him. An open window reveals a view of London Bridge, at that date still with houses on it. We are somewhere in the City of London, probably near Blackfriars Bridge. Having been unwillingly married from her father’s house, the Countess may never have revisited it until now. Perhaps the cruellest thing about her appearance as death approaches is the way her toes turn up within shoes designed for frivolity: she wore similar shoes in Scene 2, and appears to have worn them (and quickly discarded them) to the masquerade which was to have ended so blissfully. Now what was once high fashion simply expresses the onset of rigor mortis.

A doctor has been called: but there is nothing he can do, and he wanders off behind the Alderman, appearing to admire his fire precautions (a row of buckets lettered S, presumably for Sand). All we see of him is the back of his full wig and the top of his gold‐handled cane. More in evidence is the apothecary, to the right of the Countess, with a nosegay in his buttonhole to counteract the odours in which he has to move, and what looks like the top of a stomach pump and a bottle of julep in his pocket. He is making a great show of accusing a half‐witted servant of procuring the Countess’s fatal draught of laudanum; but it is possible that the apothecary was himself treating the Countess with laudanum for a sexual infection (or for countering the adverse effects of mercurial pills), and now fears blame because she has drunk the lot. The servant is not certainly guilty. Clad seemingly in some cast‐off of the yellow‐green livery worn by the old Earl’s servants in the courtyard in Scene 1, his hair in curlers in a vain attempt to keep up something of the old style, he is perhaps the only one loyal enough to have remained in the Countess’s employment.

The table by the window is laid for the Alderman’s next meal. It is meagre. A boiled egg is set upright in a dish of rice (‘It is hard to shave an egg’: old proverb¹⁹⁵). A starved dog is about to make off with a pig’s head whose upturned snout and closed eyes bear a ghoulish resemblance to the face of the dying Countess across the room. The platters appear to be of pewter, and the large jug on the floor is probably stoneware. The still life on a round table covered with a white cloth may be a deliberate parody of Chardin – for instance of The White Tablecloth of 1731–2 (fig. 19) – whose work Hogarth might have seen in Paris in 1743.

Notes