Hogarth's Marriage A-la-Mode
Marriage A-la-Mode follows a marriage arranged between a penniless earl's son and a rich merchant's daughter, from the signing of the contract to a duel and a suicide, in six paintings.
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About the series
Hogarth painted the series in the early 1740s and advertised the engravings as a set of Modern Occurrences in High Life. He hired French engravers to give the prints a finer finish than his earlier series, and published them in 1745.
Each scene is packed with clues. Earl Squander points proudly to his family tree. On the morning after, a dog sniffs at a woman's cap in the husband's pocket. The lawyer Silvertongue edges closer to the wife in every picture he is in. The story ends with the husband killed in a bathhouse and the wife poisoning herself after her lover is hanged. All six paintings are in the National Gallery in London.
The six are the same size and read in order from left to right. Hung together they make a long wall of stories for a dining room or a study.
