The Tavern Scene, plate 3 from A Rake's Progress,

1735

William Hogarth, best known for his sardonic prints of eighteenth-century London, can be credited with the invention of the British satirical print genre. The character of the “rake”—a wealthy, often aristocratic, male addicted to gambling, womanizing, and indecent behavior—was a popular stock role in English Restoration comedies of the seventeenth century. By Hogarth’s time, the term had taken on a moralizing tone, representing a life of total ethical depravity that often ended in debtor’s prison or insanity. In this series of eight engravings with narrative texts—four of which are exhibited here—Hogarth traced the decline and fall of the fictional Tom Rakewell, a wealthy young man who had moved to London following the death of his miserly father, only to squander his inheritance on luxurious living, gambling, and prostitution.

Plate 3: A drunken Tom abandons himself to a wild orgy in a brothel, while two prostitutes steal his watch. The black spots on the harlot’s faces depict make-up applied to resemble beauty marks, worn to cover their syphilitic scars.