The SUArt Collection boasts seventeen engravings and one etching by British artist William Hogarth (1697-1764). Born in London, Hogarth began his career by working as an apprentice to a silver-plate engraver. He would later move to working on his own as an engraver and painter.
By the 1730s, Hogarth was in demand by the elite for portrait painting. However, he would soon lose interest with painting the wealthy and would instead focus on what he would become well known-for: satirical moral progressions.
One of the highlights of SUArt’s Hogarth collection is Marriage a-la-Mode, a complete set of six engravings that was originally a set of paintings (now in the collection of The Tate Museum, London). Hogarth published his engravings in 1745 and they were created in order to show a type of “moral progress” where he was determined that the nature of the people represented came through as they truly were, and not as a caricature.
The scenes of Marriage a-la-Mode take place around Lord Squanderfield and his son and daughter in-law. The engravings in this series deal with adultery, deceit and disease in an upper-class marriage. The first engraving depicts the arrangement of the marriage between two young people at the house of Lord Squanderfield. The soon to be married couple sit together on a settee, but do not look at one another while her merchant father and the groom’s father plot the marriage. In the second scene the couple again are shown distracted from each other, but this time lounging in separate chairs in a messy room.
A meeting with a charlatan doctor is the third plate; the husband looks for treatment for his venereal disease contracted through his extramarital exploits, his young new lover or prostitute in tow. By the fourth plate the husband’s father has died, making the wife a Countess. She is shown in a room filled with guests, but the lawyer, Silvertongue, who was a part of the organization of her marriage, captures her attention.
Plate five is the climax of the situation where the wife and her lover Silvertongue are found out and after a duel, her husband dies. Yet as Sean Shesgreen states, he died “in the defense of a virtue which he neither honored nor valued in a woman he did not love.” In the final scene, the suicide of the wife is depicted; she poisons herself after the death of her husband and lover.
People expression further interest Hogarth’s work may contact SUArt Gallery for further collection information.
Research by Sarah Lanigan, Graduate Assistant 2007-8
Lindsay, Jack. Hogarth: His Art and His World. London: Hart-Davis, 1977. O’Connell, Sheila. “Hogarth, William”. Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Shesgreen, Sean, ed. Engravings by Hogarth. New York: Dover, 1973.