Yesterday’s blog introduced the Sir John Soane Museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields and told how it was featured on our Hidden London walks.
We explained that amongst the treasures to be seen in this wonderful old house are the originals of William Hogarth’s Rake’s Progress and The Election.
Today and tomorrow we will take you step by step through the story of the Rake’s Progress as it is featured on our London walks.
He painted The Rake’s Progress in 1732-33. The engravings followed in 1735.
Mrs Soane paid £570 for the paintings at Christie’s in 1802. These paintings have to be ‘read’ and made novelists like Fielding use their eyes.
The first is titled The Heir.
Master Tom Rakewell has just inherited his father’s fortune.
The name is a pun, the father was a niggardly miser, he raked money well. Tom, in melodramatic tradition, will become a spendthrift and rake, the antithesis of his father.
Behind Tom sits a lawyer, who no doubt helped to make the miser rich, already stealing from the open purse. A housemaid has discovered a cache of money in the chimney breast. Standing with her mother is the distressed Sarah Young.
Rakewell has made her pregnant, but not wishing to marry her is offering them money. However, the focal point of the scene is the tape measure held by the tailor against Tom’s leg. This is not a simple moral tale of debauchery, Hogarth is more subtle than that. Tom’s decline is due to his slavish following of fashion.
In the next scene, The Levee, Tom is attending a morning meeting where scholars discuss art, in particular the art of the old European masters. A Handelian musician is playing the piano.
There are fencing-masters and dancing-masters. All are here to teach the young man of fashion what he needs to make his way. Because they dressed in Italian-inspired clothes they were popularly known as ‘Macaronis’. It is these self-appointed arbiters of good taste who will lead Rakewell to destruction.
To attack this cultural snobbery Hogarth made and sold engravings of most of his work.
In The Orgy Tom, after a night of brawling with the watch, is looking to satisfy his sexual desires.
The scene is set in the Rose Tavern, Covent Garden, which, like many eighteenth- century pubs, ran a ‘cock and hen club’ (a brothel) as a lucrative sideline.
Hogarth is not condemning Tom for his desires, the picture is quite sensual, but the blank expression on his face may be due to more than drunkenness. Although he may already have contracted syphilis (a pot of pills is spilt on the floor), his blank face is due to his not enjoying what he’s doing. He is at the brothel because that is what a young man should do. The young lady is a posture dancer, she uses a polished salver, a candle, and wears no clothes for her act. The walls of the room are hung with portraits of Roman emperors, of which only Nero’s has not been defaced.
Check back tomorrow for our next installment of The Rake’s Progress.
In the meantime why not check out the rest of our site and have a look at the various London walks we offer.
Tags: Hidden London, London walks, Rake's Progress, Sir John Soane Museum, William Hogarth
