Label
"Marriage à la Mode, Plate 1
William Hogarth, English, 1697-1764
Engraving
Gift of Prof. William A. McGill, 2001.10.05.01
“This scene depicts the crude commercial transaction which yokes a powerless middle-class girl and a vain beau together in marriage. Sitting under his grand canopy, the stout, gouty Lord Squanderfield points proudly to his family tree. His geneology indicates that he is descended from William Duke of Normandy; his family, entirely aristocratic, has flourished except for a single member who married out of class. Through the window the Earl's new Palladian house is visible; work on the mansion has stopped for lack of money. Before the half-finished building loiter the curious, the scornful and the Earl's idle servants. At the window the architect, anticipating resumption of work on the place, studies A Plan of the New Building of the Right Honble.
Across from the Earl the plainly dressed merchant sits stiffly in his chair, his sword sticking out awkwardly from between his legs. The chain on his vest suggests he is an alderman. He scrutinizes the Marriage Settelmt of The Rt. Honble. Lord Viscount Squanderfield. Between the two men stands a thin usurer who accepts the Earl's newly acquired money (he holds several bags in his hand and some notes marked £1000) for a Mortgage.
In the background, appropriately enough, the couple to be married sit together on a couch. The effete beau has turned his back to his bride to admire himself in the mirror. He gazes so narcissistically at himself in the glass that he fails to notice the conduct of Lawyer Silvertongue reflected there. Wearing a foolish look of self-approval, he takes snuff affectedly and balances himself on his tiptoes.
Hunched next to him sits his unsophisticated bride, dressed much more plainly than he, resentful and discontent at the way she is being disposed of. She plays with her wedding ring. Beside her Councilor Silvertongue leans solicitously forward as he sharpens his pen. The girl, however, pays no attention to him. Beside this couple sit a pair of dogs, one with a coronet on its back; their manacled state is symbolic of the young couple's condition.
On the wall a head of Medusa seems to gaze at the scene in utter horror. Above the usurer hangs a portrait of the Earl. A burlesque of portraits executed in the sublime manner, it depicts the Earl as Jupiter with a thunderbolt in his hand, a comet flashing above him, a cherub blowing his wig in a different direction from his voluminous clothing and a cannon (placed near his groin) exploding. On top of the elaborate frame a lion seems to grin at the work. All the other pictures are scenes of disaster in the form of death or torture; they comment on different aspects of the calamitous marriage and the Earl's fashionable taste for foreign art of questionable worth. On the ceiling is a depiction of Pharaoh's armies in the Red Sea. On the walls hang pictures of David and Goliath, Judith and Holophernes, the martyrdom of St. Sebastian, Prometheus being tortured by a vulture, the massacre of the innocents, Cain killing Abel and the martyrdom of St.Lawrence.”
From Sean Shesgreen, Engravings by Hogarth
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