The Staymaker (? The Happy Marriage V: The Fitting of the Ball Gown)

Hogarth had just finished Marriage A-la-Mode, six paintings that follow a marriage arranged for money all the way to two corpses, and he announced a companion set called The Happy Marriage, in which everything was to go well. He never finished it. A few unfinished canvases are all that survive, this one among them, and even its place in that set is a guess, which is why the Tate keeps a question mark inside the title. What it shows is a fitting. A staymaker is adjusting a woman's stays, the stiffened bodice that gave 18th-century dress its shape, while the household drifts about the room. Because Hogarth stopped where he did, you are looking at his method rather than his finish, the figures brushed in thin and quick and the detail never arriving.