Label Type
Cultural/Historical ContextLabel
"A Harlot's Progress, Plate 5
William Hogarth, English, 1697-1764
Engraving
Gift of Prof. William A. McGill, 2001.10.03.05
“Moll is dying of venereal disease; already her face is white and waxen and her head falls lifelessly backward.The scene around her is agitated and disordered. Two expensively dressed parasites (identified as Dr. Richard Rock and Dr. Jean Misaubin) quarrel violently over the efficacy of their cures as their patient-victim expires unattended in their view. Before Moll's corpse is cold, a strange woman (perhaps the landlady) rifles her trunk. She has already selected for herself the most ominous articles of Moll's wardrobe: her witch's hat, her dancing shoes and her mask (now a black death mask) with a fan stuck grotesquely through its eyes. Moll's maid, with one comforting arm around the dying girl, attempts to stop the looting and the turmoil. The girl's son sits beside his mother, oblivious to her death, struggling with the lice in his hair and attempting to cook for himself.
The small apartment is the poorest and most primitive of Moll's abodes. Plaster has fallen from the walls; coal is stacked to the right of the fireside next to the bedpan covered with the plate (B...Cook at the ...); holes in the door have been filled in to keep the place warm. The room is without any of the signs of Moll's personality that characterize her previous apartments. Instead of works of art there hang on the wall only a broken mirror and a fly trap (a Jewish Passover cake coated with a sticky substance.)
Nor are there any of the usual signs of liquor; all her money has been spent on quack cures for her disease. On the floor, by the overturned table, lies an advertisement for and anodyne (pain-killing) necklace purchased to cure her own or perhaps her son's congenital syphilis. The mantelpiece is lined with similarly useless prescriptions. By the pipe, spittoon and old punchbowl, lie Moll's teeth; loosened by the fruitless use of mercury as a cure of venereal disease, they have come out. Over the expiring figure of Moll hang the limp, ghostly forms of her laundry.”
From Sean Shesgreen, Engravings by Hogarth
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