Marriage A-la-Mode: 4. The Toilette

This is the fourth of six scenes in Hogarth's Marriage A-la-Mode, painted in the early 1740s to skewer the fashionable arranged marriage. The young wife has become a countess, and she is holding a morning reception while her hair is done, aping the French court custom of receiving visitors mid-toilette. She has eyes only for the lawyer lounging beside her, Silvertongue, who dangles a ticket to a masquerade, a promise of a discreet assignation. Hogarth packs the meaning into props. A coral baby's rattle hangs on her chair, so she is a mother now. A page boy laughs and points at a little statue of Actaeon and his antlers, the old sign of the cuckolded husband. Within two more scenes the affair with Silvertongue will end in a fatal duel and the countess dead by her own hand.