Marriage A-la-Mode: 5. The Bagnio

Hogarth made this in 1743 as the fifth of six scenes in a story he invented about a fashionable marriage arranged for money and a title. By this point the young couple have drifted into their own affairs. The wife has slipped off to a bagnio, a hired room in a bath-house used for discreet meetings, with the lawyer who has been circling her. Her husband has followed and burst in. We catch the instant just after the duel: he sags, run through with the lawyer's sword, while the lover scrambles out of the window in his nightshirt and the wife falls to her knees. Hogarth painted these six pictures mainly so they could be turned into prints and sold cheaply, read like a moral serial by people who would never own the paintings.