William Hogarth - The Rake's Progress (Bedlam)

William Hogarth
The Rake's Progress - Bedlam
1734
oil on canvas
Sir John Soane's Museum, London

William Hogarth
The Rake's Progress - Bedlam (detail)
1734
oil on canvas
Sir John Soane's Museum, London

William Hogarth
The Rake's Progress - Bedlam
1735
engraving and etching
Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah, Georgia

Engravings and Caricatures

Hogarth produced several sequences of paintings that illustrate continuous narratives, prefiguring the photo-serials of the early 20th century.  His two best-known sets are Marriage à la Mode and The Rake's Progress.  The latter gave W.H. Auden the structure and inspiration for the libretto which became the opera by Igor Stravinsky.  

These canvases were popularized by engravings, also executed by Hogarth himself, in which details tend to be more legible and explanatory inscriptions are supplied.  He thus gained fame as a caricaturist and social satirist.  Simultaneously, he was making portraits of ordinary working men and women in a style marked by freshness and empathy.  

From Dress-Up to Madness

With equal enthusiasm this artist pursues beauty and probes ugliness.  In The Rake's Progress, ugliness attempts to pass itself off as beauty.  Hogarth stresses this imposture, from the contrivances of the dressing table to the contrivances of the seducer.  We watch the protagonists masking themselves with finery and makeup.  

Fragonard stages dressing table scenes as tributes to the authentic charms of the women he paints.  He shows to just what extent their beauty is inherent, and then with what intelligence it is enhanced as they apply cosmetics – not used to conceal but rather to reveal.  By contrast, the prostitutes and scheming climbers of Hogarth paint themselves to obscure blemishes, including visible signs of the many diseases endemic to their shady milieu.  

To pass off ugliness as beauty involves corruption in a moral as well as a physical sense.  This is why the final station of the journey is Bedlam, the insane asylum of London.  Here the Rake inevitably arrives, with all the maladies his life of dissolution has brought upon him.  Now a raving madman, he is punished for his vices, while deprived of makeup, wig, and even clothing.  An asylum employee restrains him with irons, observed by a pair of elegant young women standing at a distance, perhaps his former acquaintances come to enjoy the spectacle of a fall to which they may well have contributed.      

The Rake is surrounded by a crowd of the mad, who seem to provoke only amusement in the elegant young women, but who distress us – viewing the image as outsiders.  Sarah Young, the girl whom the Rake had seduced while still a student at Oxford, is the only person who attempts to console him, but he is no longer capable even of registering her presence.       

– translated and adapted from Le Musée imaginaire de Michel Butor: 105 œuvres décisives de la peinture occidentale (Paris: Flammarion, 2019)