La orgía

This is the third scene in a story Hogarth told across eight pictures: a young man, Tom Rakewell, comes into money and drinks and gambles his way to ruin. Here it is three in the morning at the Rose Tavern in Covent Garden, a real London haunt of the 1730s, and Tom sprawls drunk while a woman quietly lifts the watch from his pocket. Hogarth made his living selling engraved copies of scenes like this to a wide public, and while this set was in production he pushed Parliament to pass the first law protecting engravers from piracy, passed in 1735 and long remembered as Hogarth's Act. The eight paintings hang together today in a London house, the Soane Museum.