Label Type
Cultural/Historical ContextLabel
"Marriage à la Mode, Plate 6
William Hogarth, English, 1697-1764
Engraving
Gift of Prof. William A. McGill, 2001.10.05.06
“Her husband killed and her lover hanged, the Countess, returned to her father's house, is driven to suicide by the tragic consequences of the foolish and ill-fated venture perpetrated on her.
Plainly dressed, she expires on a chair as an ineffectual physician scurries away. On the floor lies a bottle of Laudanum; next to it the precipitating cause of her suicide, Counseller Silvertongue last Dying Speech. As her impassive, mercenary father dispassionately removes the ring from her finger, a withered old nurse holds her daughter for a dying kiss. The crippled girl has inherited both her father's venereal disease and his beauty spot; since the young Earl has no male child, his family line has ended. The apothecary, who has a stomach pump and a julep bottle in his pocket, points to the empty laudanum bottle, and berates the servant who looks at it uncomprehendingly. The fellow, who wears his master's ill-fitting coat buttoned askew, is an idiot hired cheaply by the alderman.
The house reflects the alderman's miserly life style, which has supported his costly and tragic manipulation of his daughter's life. A dark apartment with bare floors and cobwebbed window with broken panes, is located near London Bridge, which at that time had houses built across it. On the wall hangs the alderman' robe, a clock with its figures reversed (it should be 1:56 P.M.) and an Almanack. Three Dutch paintings (really satires of Dutch realism) decorate the walls; the first (unframed) depicts a man urinating; the second is a still-life crowded with ‘low’ objects (an arbitrary collection of kitchen utensils, jugs and food); the third shows a drunkard lighting his pipe from the swollen nose of a companion. In the alderman's cabinet stands a single liquor bottle, some pipes and a library of five books; four are financial records: the Day Boo, Ledge, Rent Book and Compound Interest. The hall is lined with fire buckets.
From the meager fare on the table, a skeleton-like dog steals a lean pig's head.”
From Sean Shesgreen, Engravings by Hogarth"