Hogarth's Marriage A-la-Mode
National Gallery, 15 October 1997 - 18 January 1998
Painter of inexhaustible human drama
To his contemporaries Hogarth's great series Marriage A-la-Mode was as fresh as the morning newspaper. Its stories still tickle Richard Dorment.
Marriage A-la-Mode is the most perfectly realised of Hogarth's great narrative
cycles. The series is structured exactly like a play, with the equivalents
of an introduction, narrative development, subplot, climax and epilogue. As
he had done earlier in the Harlot's and Rake's Progress, Hogarth invented his characters, but took the role of the narrator himself. "Subjects
I considered as writers do. My picture was my stage and men and women my actors."
Using the conventions of the theatre - props, poses, costumes and gestures
- he thickens his plot and moves the action forward.
In scene one we meet the cast: the improvident Earl of Squander who will
trade his ancient name for a whopping dowry, the crass Alderman who is selling
his daughter for a title, the fatally seductive lawyer Silvertongue, and the
sad young couple themselves, yoked together like a pair of mating dogs to
satisfy the ambition of their heartless fathers. These characters develop
from one scene to the next, as when the future Countess, whom we meet in scene
one as a sniffling teenage girl, turns into a sly sex kitten in scene two,
a sybaritic grande dame in scene three, and a remorseful suicide in scene
six. Through his uncanny ability to capture nuances of feeling in body language
and facial expression, Hogarth shows us not only what his characters are doing
but what they are thinking. The faces of the young couple in the first scene
are at once funny and pitiful. He is a brainless dandy affecting unconcern
at the union with a woman he doesn't love, she is able to stop blubbering
just long enough to listen to the blandishments of the family lawyer, who
whispers in her ear that he'll console her once she's wed.
Despite all the doubles entendres and visual puns, there is nothing obscure
about Hogarth. At the time they were made, the engravings of Marriage A-la-Mode
were intelligible both to the educated people who bought them and to the illiterate
servants who saw them displayed in shop windows or on their masters' walls.
Like all good storytellers, Hogarth understood how to hold the attention of
his audience by adding details that he knew would pique their curiosity. He
introduced topicality into the series by inserting real-life figures into
the action. Among the French hairdressers and mincing valets at the Countess's
morning levee, for example, the fat and effeminate singer has been identified
as the Italian counter-tenor Carestini (or the castrato Farinelli). To Hogarth's
contemporaries, such a guest appearance makes the series as fresh as the morning
newspaper.
If to an audience in the late 1990s Hogarth's saga of marital misery among
the aristocracy seems familiar, it is because we recognise in the sluttish
Countess and her unctuous lover the celebrities encountered in the pages of
Hello! magazine. For all its high comedy and delicious wit, Hogarth's point
in Marriage A-la-Mode is a serious one: there is no moral centre in this world,
its empty values lead to disease, unhappiness and violent death. Nowadays
at the Countess's morning levee you'd find a pop star, an interior decorator,
an astrologer and maybe an art dealer. The Earl would be just as likely to
pass out from a surfeit of cocaine than from drink. Otherwise, not much seems
to have changed since 1744.
Most people know Marriage A-la-Mode from the engravings. This is a pity,
for Hogarth did not engrave the series himself but entrusted it to three French
engravers. That was a mistake. Though superb technicians, they weren't able
to capture the nuances of expression on which so much of the humour depends.
As engravings, I much prefer the Harlot's or Rake's Progress, which are both
by Hogarth's own hand. When it comes to the paintings, my reaction is exactly
the reverse. The handling of pigment in earlier works such as the Rake's Progress
of 1735 is tight and finicky, which suggests that Hogarth's training as an
engraver prevented him from relaxing his control of the brush. By the time
he came to paint Marriage A-la-Mode he had developed a confidence in the use
of pigment that he didn't have in the earlier series. He applies his colours
with an easy fluency, working directly on to the canvas, without recourse
to life studies or preparatory drawings. Nothing stood between him and the
application of paint to canvas. The physical seductiveness of the paintings
comes as a surprise if we know them only in the black-and-white engravings
after them.
I didn't think there was anything new that anyone could tell me about Marriage
A-la-Mode. But the National Gallery's exhibition of the series (until January
18), organised by Judy Egerton, reveals a complexity in certain scenes that
has added dimensions to my understanding of the story. Egerton suggests, for
example, that despite his gouty foot and noble appearance, the Earl of Squander
is a fraud. In the pompous portrait that hangs on the wall behind the Earl
in scene one, he is shown wearing the Order of the Golden Fleece - an honour
which Egerton's research shows had not been conferred on an Englishman since
the time of Henry VIII. To add to the foolishness of the Alderman in marrying
his daughter into the Squander family, there is the added irony that he is
being duped: they are parvenus.
In scene three, where the young Earl brings a child prostitute to the Quack
Doctor, I had always identified the alarming woman who unclasps a penknife
as an abortionist. In fact what is happening is more convoluted. The Earl
has brought the child to the doctor because he believes that he has infected
her with syphilis. The harpy with the knife is actually the girl's mother,
feigning anger in order to blackmail the Earl, who, in a final twist, is being
set up. The child already had the pox when her mother sold her to him, either
because he was not her first "protector" or because she inherited the illness
from her syphilitic father, none other than the Quack Doctor himself.
As with all great works of art and literature, you can return to these pictures
again and again, and always find something you had not seen before. We should
be grateful to the National Gallery and to Egerton (and to the Bernard Sunley
Charitable Foundation, which is supporting the exhibition) for reminding us
that Hogarth's wit, invention and high spirits are inexhaustible.