Full title | Marriage A-la-Mode: 6, The Lady's Death |
---|---|
Artist | William Hogarth |
Artist dates | 1697 - 1764 |
Series | Marriage A-la-Mode |
Date made | about 1743 |
Medium and support | Oil on canvas |
Dimensions | 69.9 x 90.8 cm |
Inscription summary | Inscribed |
Acquisition credit | Bought, 1824 |
Inventory number | NG118 |
Location |
Room 27
(Room closed) |
Collection | Main Collection |
This is the final scene of Hogarth’s series of six paintings, Marriage A-la-Mode. The wretched Countess, dogged by the scandal following Silvertongue’s arrest, trial and sentence to death for the murder of her husband the Earl, has returned to her father’s house in the City of London.
On receiving news that Silvertongue has been hanged at Tyburn, the Countess has drunk laudanum; the bottle lies empty on the floor. An old nurse lifts the Countess’s child – deformed by congenital syphilis – to kiss her goodbye. The penny-pinching Alderman removes a ring from his daughter’s finger rather than offering comfort as she takes her final breaths.
The doctor wanders out behind the Alderman – there’s nothing more he can do. He appears to admire the whole row of fire buckets hanging on the wall in the hallway. The Alderman, unlike his dying daughter, never starts a fire he can't extinguish.
This is the final scene of Hogarth’s series of six paintings, Marriage A-la-Mode. The wretched Countess, dogged by the scandal following Silvertongue’s arrest, trial and sentence to death for the murder of her husband the Earl, has returned to her penny-pinching father’s house in the City of London, overlooking old London Bridge. A newly printed broadsheet with the words ‘Counseller Silvertou.../last dying speech...’ lies at her feet. On it is an image of the three-sided gallows at Tyburn – foreshadowed by the tripod in the third scene – where Silvertongue has been hanged by the neck.
Her lover dead, the Countess has drunk laudanum – probably the entire contents of the bottle now lying empty on the floor. An old nurse lifts the Countess’s child to kiss his or her mother goodbye (it was common at the time to dress boys in skirts until they were about eight years old). It’s all too clear that the child has congenital syphilis to an advanced degree, as indicated by the black spot on its cheek and sunken bridge of its nose. Its legs are also deformed by the disease and encased in surgical boots and braces. This group of mother, nurse and child parodies the final scene in many a novel of virtue rewarded, above all of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, which Hogarth had been invited to illustrate. The Countess’s child is unlikely to live long, bringing to an abrupt end the family tree so proudly displayed by the Earl of Squander in the first scene.
Suicide was a crime in England until 1961, and a suicide’s possessions had to be given up to the Crown until 1822 – the Alderman prudently removes a ring from his daughter’s finger rather than troubling himself to say goodbye to her as she takes her final breaths. In grabbing her arm, he prevents his daughter from returning her own child’s embrace. He is dressed as he was in the first scene; he is a man of neither fashion nor taste. The pictures in his house are all of Dutch low-life scenes with broad bourgeois jokes.
The table is set for a meagre meal: a boiled egg sits upright on a plate of rice; the starved dog gnaws at the ear of the pig’s head which, with its upturned nose and gaping mouth, echoes the expression of the dying Countess. The silver punch bowl on the table – probably presented to the Alderman after a period of office rather than bought – is the only luxury item in the room. The still life on the cloth-covered table may be a deliberate parody of Chardin’s work, which Hogarth may have seen in Paris.
The apothecary, who wears a posy in his buttonhole, appears to have a stomach pump and bottle of syrup in the pocket of his black coat. He is making a great show of accusing the half-witted servant of procuring the Countess’s bottle of laudanum, but he may have been treating the Countess himself with it and now fears blame because she has drunk the lot.
The doctor wanders out behind the Alderman – there is nothing more he can do. He appears to admire the whole row of fire buckets hanging on the wall in the hallway, each lettered with ’s‘ for sand. The Alderman, unlike his dying daughter, never starts a fire he can’t extinguish.
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Marriage A-la-Mode: 6, The Lady's Death
Marriage A-la-Mode
For centuries, the English have been fascinated by the sexual exploits and squalid greed of the aristocracy, and these are the subjects of the six-part series Marriage A-la-Mode, which illustrates the disastrous consequences of marrying for money rather than love. The basic story is of a marriage arranged by two self-seeking fathers – a spendthrift nobleman who needs cash and a wealthy City of London merchant who wants to buy into the aristocracy. It was Hogarth’s first moralising series satirising the upper classes.
The six pictures were painted in about 1743 to be engraved and then offered for sale after the engravings were finished. The engravings are uncoloured, reversed versions of the paintings. Published in 1745, the engravings were offered to subscribers at a guinea a set. They proved instantly popular and gave Hogarth’s work a wide audience. The paintings were offered for sale by twelve noon on 6 June 1751, but only attracted two bidders, one of whom bought them all for £126.
For centuries, the English have been fascinated by the sexual exploits and squalid greed of the aristocracy, and these are the subjects of one of the supreme achievements of British painting – Hogarth’s six-part series Marriage A-la-Mode, which illustrates the disastrous consequences of marrying for money rather than love.
The basic story is of a marriage arranged by two self-seeking fathers – a spendthrift nobleman who needs cash and a wealthy City of London merchant who wants to buy into the aristocracy. The title, though little else, is taken from John Dryden’s play Marriage A-la-Mode first performed in 1672. Hogarth was a devoted play-goer and made his name as a painter with a scene from John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera. But for this series he invented the characters, plot and the title of each scene. The pictures were painted to be engraved and then offered for sale ‘to the Highest Bidder’ after the engravings were finished.
In his ‘Autobiographical Notes’ compiled in 1763, Hogarth recalls that after ‘a few years’ of painting portraits and conversation pieces, he realised that this ‘manner of painting was not sufficiently paid to do everything my family required‘. He decided to try the new approach of painting and engraving ‘modern moral subjects’ which he described as so novel as to be a ’Field unbroke up in any Country or any age‘. His new focus on morality was characteristic of his own approach to life, satirising vice and folly. 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. A Rake’s Progress in eight scenes followed; the paintings were completed by mid-1734 and the engravings published in June 1735. Both series sold out and proved extremely successful with people from all walks of life.
The writer Henry Fielding described Hogarth as a ‘Comic History Painter’, but one whose characters are free from the ’distortions and exaggerations of caricature‘. History painting was the most prestigious of the genres, depicting heroic scenes from the past and from mythology intended to inspire and educate the viewer. The characters in Hogarth’s ’modern moral subjects' are far from heroic but are equally intended to educate.
Marriage A-la-Mode was Hogarth’s first moralising series satirising the upper classes, which exposed the shallowness and stupidity of people with more money than taste who are unable to distinguish good from bad. The engravings were instantly popular and gave Hogarth’s work a wide audience. Like A Harlot’s Progress, they were offered to subscribers at a guinea a set. As a receipt for payment of the first half-guinea, subscribers were issued with a print of Hogarth’s etching Characters and Caricaturas, based on one of the sixteenth-century Italian artist Agostino Carracci’s sheets of caricatures. Hogarth intended to demonstrate that an infinite variety of characters could be shown without resorting to caricature.
Hogarth probably worked on the paintings of Marriage A-la-Mode throughout 1743, and perhaps in the early part of 1744. He had engraved his earlier series A Harlot’s Progress and A Rake’s Progress himself, but he decided to employ three French engravers who were working in London for Marriage A-la-Mode, each working on two plates in the series. The engravings, published in 1745, are uncoloured, reversed versions of the paintings.
The paintings were offered for sale by twelve noon on 6 June 1751. Perhaps the subjects had become too familiar in the form of engravings as one of only two bidders, John Lane, came forward and he purchased the set of paintings for £126.
The deliberate and assured design of the first three scenes is not matched in the last three. Scene five was largely worked out on the canvas as Hogarth went along. No preliminary studies are known and none may have been made. Hogarth claimed that he designed in his mind’s eye without directly drawing it at the time.
Scene 1: The Marriage Settlement: The Earl of Squander is arranging the marriage of his son to the daughter of a rich Alderman of the City of London. The Alderman, who is plainly dressed, holds the marriage contract, while his daughter behind him listens to a young lawyer, Silvertongue. The Earl’s son, the Viscount, admires his face in a mirror. Two dogs, chained together in the bottom left corner, perhaps symbolise the marriage.
Scene 2: The Tête à Tête: The young couple’s home reflects their own antipathy and disharmony. The tired Viscountess, who appears to have given a card party the previous evening, is at breakfast in the couple’s expensive house, which is now in disorder. The Viscount returns exhausted from a night spent away from home, probably at a brothel: the dog sniffs a lady’s cap in his pocket.
Scene 3: The Inspection: The third scene takes place in the room of a French doctor (M. de la Pillule). The Viscount is seated with his child mistress beside him, he has apparently given her the venereal disease syphilis, as indicated by the black spot on his neck.
Scene 4: The Toilette: After the death of the old Earl the wife is now the Countess, with a coronet above her bed and over the dressing table, where she sits. She is talking to her admirer Silvertongue while having her hair dressed. She has also become a mother, and a child’s teething coral hangs from her chair. The lawyer Silvertongue invites her to a masquerade, like the one depicted on the screen to which he points.
Scene 5: The Bagnio: This episode takes place in a bagnio. The word was traditionally used to describe coffee houses which offered Turkish baths, but by 1740 it meant a place where rooms were provided for the night with no questions asked. The Countess and the lawyer have retired there after the masquerade. The young Earl has followed them and is dying from a wound inflicted by Silvertongue, who escapes through the window, while the Countess pleads forgiveness.
Scene 6: The Lady’s Death: The final scene takes place in the house of the Countess’s father. She has taken poison on learning that her lover has been hanged for the murder of the Earl, reported in the broadsheet at her feet. Her child, deformed and crippled by congenital syphilis, embraces her and her father takes a ring from her finger. An apothecary scolds the servant whom he accuses of obtaining the poison.






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