Where to See William Hogarth: Marriage A-la-Mode, the Shrimp Girl and His Pug

Cash is already on the table, but the future bride and groom can barely be bothered to look at each other. In The Marriage Settlement, a bankrupt aristocratic household bargains with a wealthy City family. One side wants money, the other a title. Below the negotiations, two dogs are chained together. Hogarth has supplied a second marriage contract without a word of legal language. This is where to begin at London’s National Gallery, with the first of the six Marriage A-la-Mode paintings.

The National Gallery: follow the money into the marriage

By The Tête à Tête, the second scene, the bargain has furnished a house but failed to make a couple. The husband has come home exhausted, and a dog investigates the woman’s cap in his pocket. His wife stretches; the household steward leaves with unpaid bills. The clock says it is after noon. Instead of announcing an affair in a caption, Hogarth lets an animal discover the evidence. Meanwhile the paper in the steward’s hand keeps the financial story running beside the sexual one.

The ending, The Lady’s Death, returns the daughter to her father’s house. She has taken poison after hearing that her lover was executed for killing her husband. A nurse raises her child for a farewell kiss. The father removes a ring from his dying daughter’s finger. That tiny action links the last room to the first: property still claims his attention. Read the series in order, but come back to the opening negotiations once you have seen what the participants have purchased.

A nursery with a missing child

Four children appear to be enjoying themselves in The Graham Children, also in the National Gallery. Yet the baby, Thomas, had died while Hogarth was working on the portrait. He made a chalk study after the child’s death. The apparently ordinary group carries that absence without emptying the nursery of movement. Richard Robert plays a small organ used to teach birds to sing, while a cat claws up towards the caged goldfinch. The family’s liveliness and its recent loss occupy the same room.

The market seller in The Shrimp Girl has no elaborate room around her. Her basket contains a measure for selling shellfish by the half-pint; the brushwork leaves parts of the ground visible. She may be smiling or calling out her wares. Hogarth kept this sketch in his studio, and his widow reportedly used it to answer critics who doubted his ability to paint living flesh. After the marriage’s calculated ruin and the nursery’s bereavement, the open mouth feels like a voice coming straight from the street.

Tate: a dog outside the portrait

Hogarth gives himself a companion in The Painter and his Pug, in Tate’s London collection. The man appears on an oval canvas within the painting; the dog, probably Trump, sits outside that inner portrait. X-rays reveal an earlier version of the man in a formal coat and wig, replaced by the cap and informal dress. Books by Shakespeare, Swift and Milton support the painted likeness. Hogarth has chosen his literary company, changed his clothes and put the dog nearest the spectator.

Six other members of his household receive their own scrutiny in Hogarth’s Servants. Their names are not securely established. Kate Retford’s study of the picture describes people who shared a roof without sharing blood or marriage, and who lived under Hogarth’s authority as employer. The heads remained with him and then his widow before being sold. Their differing ages also offered a study of skin and expression. No overturned chair or compromising letter is needed: there is enough to attend to in six separate faces.

Tate: the painter gets arrested

A trip to France supplied Hogarth with a less flattering role. While sketching the fortifications at Calais in 1748, he was arrested on suspicion of spying. After his release and return home he made The Gate of Calais, now in Tate’s collection. He included himself at the left, drawing as a soldier’s hand reaches towards him. In the middle, a huge piece of beef is carried towards an English inn, attracting hungry attention. His revenge took the form of an English dinner that the French characters cannot share.

The national caricature is part of the picture’s argument, so it deserves to remain visible as caricature. Ragged soldiers and a well-fed friar make France look hungry and unequal; the beef advertises an English prosperity that Hogarth’s other paintings make much harder to take for granted. After the wasteful household in The Tête à Tête, the patriotic boast has an awkward neighbour. Looking between those pictures means watching Hogarth change the target of his anger, rather than accepting every painted judgment as a report.

For a single museum visit, give the National Gallery enough time for the whole marriage sequence and one quieter encounter afterwards. Choose the children if you want to stay with objects that carry hidden meanings, or the shellfish seller if you need to stop deciphering. Add Tate when you can give the household portraits their own attention. Hogarth’s rooms fill quickly with evidence; a face that asks for no verdict makes a useful place to finish.