Plate III 1745

This is Plate III of “Marriage A-la-Mode,” an engraving made by William Hogarth, a painter and printmaker working in England during the first half of the 18th century. This series of prints satirizes the conventions of arranged marriages among the upper classes, suggesting that they often lead to unhappiness and moral corruption. Here, we see the young husband has returned home after spending the night elsewhere. The setting is his private chamber, filled with classical busts, a skeleton and other symbols of the aristocratic “grand tour,” and scientific instruments suggesting enlightenment values. But what meaning do these trappings of culture have when the marriage is loveless? Hogarth uses a comic scene to comment on the emptiness of elite social rituals. To interpret Hogarth, scholars look at visual sources like emblem books and consider his ties to the London theater scene, and the rise of a print market that made his work widely available. What is art’s public role when social values are changing so rapidly?