Label Type
Cultural/Historical ContextLabel
"Marriage à la Mode, Plate 3
William Hogarth, English, 1697-1764
Engraving
Gift of Prof. William A. McGill, 2001.10.05.03
“The young couple's depravity has increased and their idle, pleasure-seeking lives are now so unconnected that they are portrayed in separate plates. Plate III shows the husband attending to one of the consequences of his debauchery. He has come to a quack whose house is a gallery of grotesque objects, many of them images of death.
In a glass case behind the young nobleman a human skeleton makes sexual advances to a preserved cadaver. A wig block stands beside them. The horn of a narwhal projects from the side of the case; the horn and the shaving dish between the pillboxes and the urinal warn that this quack was trained as a barber. The rest of the items hint at the practice of a science more ominous and occult than medicine; they include: a femur, a human head with a pill in its mouth, a tripod shaped like a gallows, a bone, a hat, shoes, a spur, a chained crocodile, a sword and shield, a bug and a picture of a child. Above these hangs a stuffed crocodile with an ostrich's egg attached to its belly.
Through the door the quack's laboratory is visible. In the left foreground stand two threatening machines used for oddly divergent purposes: An explanation of two superb machines, one for setting shoulders, the other for pulling corks, invented by Mr. Pill, seen and approved by the Royal Academy of Sciences of Paris. On the right side of the room stands a cupboard full of labeled jars and drawers. A ferocious wolf's head seems to warn of their contents and of their owner's voraciousness. Beside the chest stand two mummies and two pictures of abnormal human beings.
Squanderfield, half-threateningly and half-cajolingly, complains about the efficacy of the doctor's pills. The bowlegged quack, standing beside a memento mori, defends himself. The pathetic, tearful child standing between the nobleman's legs seems to be the victim of his decadent appetite for girl-children, his interest in normal sexual relationships having been exhausted. The relationships between the nobleman, his child-mistress and the commanding, fierce-eyed woman who opens the clasp knife is unclear. The wild-eyed woman may be his second mistress, prompted to violence by the disease acquired from the man or by jealousy of the younger girl; she may be the girl's mother or procurer about to revenge her pollution or defend some aspect of her business reputation.”
From Sean Shesgreen, Engravings by Hogarth"