Il matrimonio alla moda: 6. La morte della dama

This is the last of six scenes in Hogarth's story of a marriage arranged for money, a broke earl's son wed to a rich merchant's daughter, neither of them willing. It ends in the merchant father's plain house in the City of London, its window looking out onto old London Bridge. The daughter has taken poison after her lover was hanged for killing her husband. A broadsheet of his last dying speech lies on the floor beside the empty bottle. Even now her father is slipping the ring off her finger before she is quite gone, unwilling to let it be buried with her. Hogarth painted the set in 1743 and sold the story cheaply as prints, aiming it at a London public who knew exactly which sort of families he meant.