Ferdinands vader besluit dat Ferdinand met Lady Milford moet trouwen 1785

This tiny engraving was made by Daniel Nikolaus Chodowiecki, probably in Berlin, sometime in the late eighteenth century. It depicts a scene from a play, in which Ferdinand’s father decides that Ferdinand must marry Lady Milford. Engravings like this were often made as illustrations for books. Here, Chodowiecki is working in a tradition that extends back to Hogarth in England, using images to comment on the morality of the social elite. Notice the sumptuous furnishings, the father’s commanding gesture, and the son’s obedient posture. These details speak to the rigid social expectations of the time, where marriage was often a matter of political or economic strategy rather than love. Looking at the plays and novels that these images were based on can tell us a lot about the social values of the time. Institutional records, such as library archives and publishing houses, can help historians understand the meanings that artworks like this would have had for their original audiences.