Marriage à-la-mode
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- This article is about the series of pictures by William Hogarth; Marriage A-la-Mode is also the name of a play by John Dryden.
Marriage à-la-mode is a series of six paintings from c.1743 and engravings from 1745 by
William Hogarth. Marital ethics were the topic of much debate in 18th-century Britain. Frequent marriages of convenience and their attendant unhappiness came in for particular criticism, with a variety of authors taking the view that love was a much sounder basis for marriage. William Hogarth here painted a satire – a genre that by definition has a moral point to convey – of a conventional marriage within the English upper class. All the paintings were engraved and the series achieved wide circulation in print form. The series, which are set in a Classical interior, shows the story of the fashionable marriage of the son of bankrupt Earl Squanderfield to the daughter of a wealthy but
miserly city merchant, starting with the signing of a marriage contract at the Earl's mansion and ending with the
murder of the son by his wife's lover and the
suicide of the daughter after her lover is hanged at
Tyburn for murdering her husband.
Image:William Hogarth 038.jpg|The Marriage Contract
Image:HogarthMarriage.jpg|Shortly After the Marriage
Image:William Hogarth 036.jpg|The Visit to the Quack Doctor
Image:William Hogarth 042.jpg|The Countess's Morning Levee
Image:William Hogarth 039.jpg|The Death of the Earl
Image:William Hogarth 043.jpg|The Suicide of the Countess
See also
External links
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