Marriage A-la-Mode is a series of six pictures painted by William Hogarth between 1743 and 1745, intended as a pointed skewering of 18th-century society. They show the disastrous results of an ill-considered marriage for money or social status, and satirize patronage and aesthetics. The pictures are held in the National Gallery in London. This series was not received as well as his other moral tales, A Harlot's Progress (1732) and A Rake's Progress (1735), and when the paintings were finally sold in 1751, it was for a much lower sum than the artist had hoped for.

Overview

In Marriage A-la-Mode Hogarth challenges the traditional view that the nobility and the rich live virtuous lives, and satirises arranged marriages. In each piece, he shows the young couple and their family and acquaintances at their worst: engaging in affairs, drinking, gambling, and numerous other vices. This is regarded by some as his finest project, and the best example of his serially-planned story cycles. These pictures were at first poorly received by the public, to the great disappointment of the artist. He sold them to a Mr. Lane of Hillington for one hundred and twenty guineas. The frames alone had cost Hogarth four guineas each, so his initial remuneration for painting this valuable series was only sixteen shillings over a hundred pounds. After Lane's death they became the property of his nephew, Colonel Cawthorn. In May 1796 they were sold by auction at Christie's, Pall Mall for one thousand guineas to John Julius Angerstein. They are now owned by the British government and are part of the collection of the National Gallery. It had been Hogarth's intention to follow the Marriage A-la-Mode series with a companion series called The Happy Marriage, but that series only exists as a series of unfinished sketches.

Technical commentary

Although this series of paintings are works of art in their own right, their original purpose was to provide the subjects for the series of engraved copper plate prints. When engraving copper plates the image engraved on the plate is a mirror image of the final print. Normally, when undertaking paintings that are to be engraved, the painting is produced the "right way round" — not reversed, and then the engraver views it in a mirror as he undertakes the engraving. Hogarth was an engraver himself and disliked this method, so, unusually, he produced the paintings for Marriage à-la-mode already reversed so the engraver could directly copy them. Images are read from left to right, and Hogarth would have taken this into account when composing the original paintings.

Naming

Commentators have used a variety of names for the individual paintings, but as the paintings are presently in the National Gallery the names used there are used here.