In the previous article, I showed William Hogarth’s first two narrative series, A Harlot’s Progress from 1731, and its compliment, A Rake’s Progress painted and printed between 1732-5. Spurred on by the commercial success of their prints, and the reception given to his paintings, Hogarth continued to create similar narrative series, although in most cases his original paintings reduced to what was required to make the prints, rather than finished oil paintings. This article looks at two later series for which he did paint in earnest: Four Times of the Day from 1736, and his most famous Marriage A-la-Mode from about 1743.

Four Times of the Day (1736)

Compared with Hogarth’s other narrative series, this is more experimental in terms of narrative. Instead of showing the same group of characters in a series of scenes over time, he shows four views of various people going about their lives in different parts of London, each at a different time of day, and in a different season. Thus their only real link is that of time, and their moralising more limited.

A lady, making her way to church, crosses the west side of the piazza of Covent Garden, early on a winter’s morning. Holding, but not opening, her fan, she stares intently at two couples who are making love, the men fondling the women lustfully. A small group of children by them are warming up over an open fire. Behind the couples is Tom King’s Coffee House, which opened once the tavern doors closed. A fight appears to have broken out inside, and a wig flies out. People in the background are setting up market stalls ready for the start of the day.

For noon, we move to Hog Lane, in the slums near Saint Giles in the Fields, the church in the background. It’s spring, and a group of Huguenots are leaving the French Church (now in Soho); they had arrived as refugees during the 1680s, and engaged in silk and related trades, hence their fashionable dress and decorum.

Opposite is a contrasting group of Londoners outside a pie shop: a black man fondles the breast of a woman holding a pie, which is about to fall as quickly as her virtue. In front of her a young boy bawls over his pie, which has broken, dropping fragments to feed a beggar below. The body of a dead cat rests on the dividing line between the two groups.

At dusk, in the warmth of the summer, we’re outside the Sadler’s Wells theatre near Islington, at that time among open fields and countryside. Against a background of a cow being milked, a dyer carries his tired young daughter, alongside his large wife. The cow’s horns are positioned so as to appear to be on the dyer’s head, a well-known sign that he’s a cuckold. Two children behind them replay a scene of marital discord, while inside the tavern, those escaping the oppressive air of the city are sat in the smoke of their pipes.

Here it’s late at night on 29 May, Oak Apple Day, which celebrates the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. We’re back in the centre of London, in what was then the Charing Cross Road, now known as Whitehall. A bonfire has caused the Salisbury Flying Coach to overturn. In the foreground, the Worshipful Master of a Masonic Lodge, usually identified as the hard-line judge Sir Thomas de Veil, is so drunk that he’s being helped home by his Tyler (doorkeeper); a chamberpot is being emptied over them from above. Around them are taverns well known for their brothels, and signs to bagnios of the type shown in Marriage A-la-Mode.

Inside the window at the right, a barber-surgeon is busy shaving a customer haphazardly, as if drunk. Below the window the homeless are settling down for the night, and a child blows on a firework.

This series is radically different from Hogarth’s more conventional narratives. These four paintings tell of the passing of time, both within a single day and over the course of a whole year. Each of them contains a rich collection of small stories, much in the way developed by William Powell Frith over a century later, in The Derby Day (1856-58) and its successors.

For the most famous of his series, Hogarth returned to more conventional narrative form and inevitable moralising.

Marriage A-la-Mode (c 1743)

A summary of the plot covered by the six paintings in this series might run:

A marriage is arranged between the son of the Earl of Squander, Viscount Squanderfield, and the daughter of an Alderman. The Earl of Squander has title and nobility but is near-bankrupt; on the other hand, the Alderman has wealth but no title or nobility. Despite their marriage, both pursue their own lives, she in an affair with Silvertongue, the Alderman’s lawyer, and he in brothels and other places of ill-repute. He inevitably contracts syphilis from prostitutes. She rises in society, attending masquerade balls and engaging in liaisons there.

After a masquerade, she takes Silvertongue to a rooming house to sleep with him, but is discovered there by her husband. Silvertongue kills her husband in the ensuing sword fight, and makes his escape through the window, but is arrested later. He is tried for the Viscount’s murder, and hanged. She returns to her father, the Alderman, where she drinks poison and dies, her infant child (who was born with congenital syphilis) reaching out for its mother.

Hogarth employed French engravers to make the plates for printing, and the resulting prints benefited from that. However, his original canvases are beautifully painted, and make great use of colour and facture. They are well worth seeing as works of art, not just as a narrative series.

I acknowledge the excellent text and DVD accounts of Egerton (1997) as my sources for the readings of this series.

The Marriage Settlement. Hogarth opens the series in the Earl of Squander’s bedroom, in his town house, where the Earl and the Alderman, and their lawyers, are agreeing a contract of marriage and settlement for the Earl’s son, Viscount Squanderfield, to marry the Alderman’s daughter.

The Earl brandishes his nobility at every opportunity. At his left hand is a spurious family pedigree tracing his ancestry back to William the Conqueror. Coronets decorate many items in the room, even his crutches. He is finely dressed in an old-fashioned court style, but suffers from gout. Outside, the builders of his new, more grandiose, house are idle as he has finally run out of money.

The Alderman is something of a social misfit, wearing plain rather than elegant clothes. He clutches the centrepiece of the painting, the document of marriage settlement, while he and the Earl continue to haggle over it. However, his money, in the form of bags of gold coins, is already spread in front of the Earl.

At the left, backs towards one another, are the bride and groom. The Viscount is dressed in the latest fashion, but is clearly a foolish fop. On the left side of his neck, he already bears the black pox-mark of syphilis. His bride is in intimate discussion with her father’s young lawyer, Silvertongue. She wears her wedding dress in anticipation of the settlement, but is sullen and disengaged.

In front of the couple, a dog and bitch are chained together, as the bride and groom soon will be. Behind them all, the paintings are ‘dark old masters’, including the ominous Medusa, martyrdoms of Saints Lawrence and Agnes, Cain Slaying Abel, and Judith with the Head of Holofernes, culminating by the window in a huge portrait of the Earl.

The Tête à Tête. Some months after the wedding, the Viscount has returned from a night in gaming houses and brothels. A dog sniffs at a scented cap in his jacket pocket, from one of the prostitutes, and another is wrapped around his sword, which lies broken inside its scabbard on the floor in front of him. He is the worse for wear, and his pox-mark plainly visible on his neck.

She is not bothered by the Viscount’s condition, but has a knowing smile which could indicate her early pregnancy, suggested by her posture, or her continuing affair with Silvertongue. Behind her are the cards from a whist party. In front of the couple, two violins in cases are positioned to suggest the act of copulation. The rest of the room exudes bad taste.

In the background, a slovenly footman is loafing idly. On the left, the steward has abandoned his attempt to get the Viscount to settle a thick sheaf of bills. Further cues are provided by the paintings, most notably one largely obscured by a green curtain: the little glimpse we are given suggests it shows sexual activity too explicit to be seen, and a reminder of the couple’s separate couplings.

The Inspection. Hogarth next takes us to a doctor’s consulting room where the Viscount, who appears familiar with the room, is in company with a young girl and an older woman most probably her mother, both of them prostitutes. They’re seeking the aid of a doctor who is thoroughly foul in appearance, and himself suffering from severe congenital syphilis.

A crucial detail which may be hard to see in this image is of a link between three small boxes of black pills: the young woman holds one closed box; a second closed box is on the seat of the chair in front of the Viscount’s crotch; the third is open in the Viscount’s right hand, outstretched towards the doctor. The pills are black, in common with the pox-marks on the Viscount and the mother, indicating they’re mercuric salts used to treat syphilis. The implication is that the Viscount is questioning their effectiveness with the doctor.

A skull on the table at the left bears the unmistakeable erosions produced by advanced syphilis. All around the group are various troubling items of medical equipment and specimens. More worrying still, the mother, whose sleeves are made of the same patterned fabric as the girl’s gown, is caressing a cutthroat surgical knife.

The Toilette. Some time later, the couple have inherited the late Earl’s title, now being the Earl and Countess Squander. She is being entertained while completing her dressing and preparations for the day. By her right arm hangs a teething coral, indicating that she’s now the mother of an unseen infant, who is being raised by a nurse.

To the right of the Countess, Silvertongue rests at ease, his feet uncouthly laid on the sofa, and clearly intimate with her. He offers her a ticket to a masquerade ball, where he will no doubt meet her. His left hand gestures towards a painted screen showing such a masquerade.

At the left an Italian castrato is singing to the accompaniment of a flute. The others are disinterested, apart from a woman in white, who is swooning at the singer. Beneath him are invitation cards scattered on the floor. Servants are in attendance, including a French hairdresser, who is curling the Countess’s hair.

Hogarth’s selection of paintings for this scene is revealing and satirical. Above the castrato is the Rape of Ganymede, and above that a portrait of Silvertongue. Above the Countess is Io in ecstatic embrace with Jupiter, and Lot’s daughters making their father drunk so that he can inseminate them both.

The Bagnio. The climax of Hogarth’s story is set in a bagnio, a room in a rooming house intended for illicit liaisons and gambling. The Earl stands, with the posture of a dying man, possibly a visual reference to the deposition of Christ, mortally wounded in the chest, his sword impaled in the floor in front of him.

The Countess, dressed in bedclothes with a small cap, is on bended knee in front of him, apparently praying for forgiveness. Her clothes are scattered around the floor, as if removed in haste, her stays having fallen on a bundle of faggots, then a common reference to prostitutes. Silvertongue, also in night dress, is making his escape through an open window, having fought the Earl, leaving his sword in the foreground, covered in the Earl’s blood.

At the far right, a night watchman and constable force their way in, the watchman’s lantern casting the shadow of a cross on the door.

The implicit narrative is that the Countess and Silvertongue met as arranged at the masquerade, and adjourned to the bagnio to consummate their lust. The Earl had tracked them down, and entered the room. Silvertongue fought and killed him, but his attempt to escape will prove unsuccessful now that the police are involved. He will therefore be tried, sentenced to death, and hanged.

For this, Hogarth chose a tapestry of the Judgement of Solomon, and paintings showing Saint Luke, and a parody best described as a portrait of a harlot.

The Lady’s Death. The final scene takes place in the Alderman’s house, where the Countess has fled in the aftermath of her husband’s murder and her lover’s execution. Its composition matches that of the first painting, but contrasts with it in its frugal appearance. Its furnishings are minimal and functional, and the floorboards bare.

The Countess is in the throes of death on an armchair, an empty vial of laudanum (tincture of opium) by her feet. Between her fashionable shoes and the vial is a printed broadsheet containing the dying speech of Silvertongue prior to his execution. Her father, wearing the same clothes as he did in the first painting, is removing her rings, as at that time someone who committed suicide couldn’t retain any property.

A nurse holds the Countess’s infant for one last embrace. The infant bears the tragic marks and deformities of severe congenital syphilis. In the middle of the canvas, an apothecary is berating a servant for obtaining the laudanum. A doctor skulks in the background, powerless to save the dying Countess. A poor breakfast is laid up on the table, with a dog stealing the pig’s head from it.

Over the course of his career, Hogarth created at least seven complete narrative series, and one incomplete:

• A Harlot’s Progress (c 1731), 6 paintings and prints,
• A Rake’s Progress (1732-5), 8 paintings and prints,
• Four Times of the Day (1736), 4 paintings and prints,
• Marriage A-la-Mode (c 1743-5), 6 paintings and prints,
• The Happy Marriage (started c 1745), 2 paintings, incomplete,
• Industry and Idleness (1747), 12 prints,
• The Four Stages of Cruelty (1751), 4 prints,
• The Humours of an Election (1755), 4 paintings and prints.

Pirated copies of his prints became such a problem to Hogarth that he pressed for better protective legislation: the Engravers’ Copyright Act became law on 25 June 1735 to provide just that, and has since flourished into modern copyright law. The original act was widely known as Hogarth’s Act.

Hogarth also painted a few more conventional religious narratives, and many portraits. Although he felt that he never attained his goal of developing British history painting from that of James Thornhill, what he did instead was new, and something other British artists could build on.

References

Wikipedia on Marriage A-la-Mode
Wikipedia on Four Times of the Day

Egerton, J (1997, 2010) Hogarth’s Marriage A-la-Mode, National Gallery Company. ISBN 978 1 8570 9510 4. Complete with a DVD.
Hallett M (2000) Hogarth, Art & Ideas, Phaidon Press. ISBN 978 0 7148 3818 2.