The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
William Hogarth · the eight paintings and the eight engravings published from them, scored as one work · oil on canvas, eight horizontal canvases at cabinet scale, the figures a fraction of life size, made about 1732 to 1734 · the engravings issued in June 1735, timed to the Engravers’ Copyright Act of that year · the paintings in Sir John Soane’s Museum, London, hung together in the picture room on hinged panels · the prints in many impressions
Mode
The modern moral subject in sequence: a contemporary London life told in eight paintings made to be engraved, and in the engravings
Mythos
The prodigal son with no return and no father’s house; the faithful woman following the fallen man, refused and returning
Phase
Painted about 1732 to 1734; engraved and issued in June 1735, timed to the Engravers’ Copyright Act; the plates reworked in 1763
Presentation
Eight horizontal canvases at cabinet scale, now together in Sir John Soane’s Museum; eight engraved plates of matching format, reversed from the paintings and captioned with verses
Register
Comedy turning to pathos as the fortune falls; satire’s busy eye, stilled once, at the end
Scale
One life in eight rooms and streets of one city; two fortunes gained and lost
Governing Proposition
Eight pictures follow one young man, Tom Rakewell, from the house where his miser father’s hoard is opened to the madhouse where he lies chained. Between the two the money passes through the levee, the tavern, the bailiffs, the church, the gaming house and the debtors’ prison, and every room is shown as a mechanism that feeds on it. The wager of the series is that a life can be told as a sequence of places through which money passes, that only separate pictures in an order can show it, and that the moral the viewer supplies between them is part of the work. At the edge of five of the eight stands the woman he abandoned, the one figure the current does not touch.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The series is eight scenes, and one man is in all of them. In the first his father, a miser, is dead, and the hoard is opened: the money that has been kept in a dark house passes at once into new hands. Tom Rakewell is the heir, and the series begins with an inheritance and ends with its last expense. His name says what he is. He is a type, and the series does not pretend otherwise.
The eight are paintings in oil, horizontal canvases at cabinet scale with the figures a fraction of life size, made about 1732 to 1734; and they are the eight engravings Hogarth published from them in June 1735. The work scored is both, as one. The paintings were made to be engraved, and the prints were the edition by which the series lived: reversed from the canvases, captioned with verses, legible at arm’s length, in the hands of many. The paintings hang together in Sir John Soane’s Museum in London, in the picture room, on hinged panels.
Already in the first scene the woman who will follow him is there. Sarah Young has been seduced and abandoned by him, and she appears at the edge of five of the eight scenes, the first, the fourth, the fifth, the seventh and the eighth. She is the series’ one figure outside its law, the only one in it who gives and asks for nothing, and she is present at its beginning and at its end.
Movement II
In the second scene the heir holds a levee. Seven attendants wait on him, among them a garden designer and a fencing master: the trades that live on new money. The scene is a census more than a drama: each figure is an instance of what the money buys, and each takes a share. In the third scene, the Rose Tavern in Covent Garden, appetite takes its turn, with thefts under way and a posture woman among the company, a crowd of instances.
These two are the series’ fullest statements of display and appetite and its points of most slack. Both are scenes of spending, and the chain would lose colour more than logic without one of them. The density here is partly accumulation: the number of attendants, the number of thieves, the business of each corner of the room, is permitted by the subject rather than compelled by it. Satire keeps the eye busy, and in these rooms it is busiest.
The first scene and these two make the rise. A Harlot’s Progress (1732) had already shown the way three years before: a contemporary London life told in a painted and engraved sequence, outside history painting and Dutch genre both. The Rake takes the method further, with a man in place of a woman, eight scenes in place of six, a wider range of institutions and two falls in place of one. The path was its maker’s own, and the market for it proved.
Movement III
The fourth scene is the first fall. In St James’s Street, on the way to court on a court day, Tom is arrested for debt by the bailiffs, and Sarah rescues him. The rescue ties her to him, and the next scene turns on it. Remove the arrest and the marriage that follows loses its meaning.
In the fifth scene Tom recovers his fortune by marrying an old woman for her money. The marriage takes place in a church, and at the back, turned away, stand Sarah with his child and her mother, while Tom looks past his bride. The sacred appears in the series as a marriage of convenience, the church one more room through which the money passes.
Between the fourth and fifth scenes, as between every two, there is an interval the pictures do not show: the viewer supplies what happened, and the supplying is the moral reading. The form of separate pictures in an order is the instrument of the series’ knowledge, that a life is a sequence of places through which money passes, each ruining a little more. Each room holds the man for a moment and lets him go.
Movement IV
The sixth scene is the second fall. In a gaming house the second fortune is lost, and the ruined man is on his knees, his wig torn off and his fist raised. It is the series’ moment of dreadful energy, and the first time the comedy gives way to something else.
The seventh scene is the Fleet Prison, where debtors are held. Here are the failed schemes: a play he has written, rejected; on the bed the wings of a would-be flyer; and Sarah, fainting. The prison is a room of failed schemes, and the creditors and the failed play are the cause of what follows. Remove it and Bedlam would arrive without a reason.
Two reversals of fortune have now come and gone, and there will be no third. The register has moved from comedy to pathos, and the move obeys the descent. The staging remains the theatre’s, rooms set like flats and figures placed so that the protagonist reads at once; the gestures carry it: the kneeling gambler, the faint in the Fleet. The drawing of figures is at times stiff or caricatured, and the colour serves the narrative rather than bearing it.
Movement V
The eighth scene is Bethlem Hospital, the madhouse. Tom lies half naked and chained, and Sarah holds him in a pose that recalls a deposition or a pietà. Around him are the madmen, among them one in the cell beside him, and two fashionable visitors who have come to look. The comedy of the madhouse turns to horror, and the series, which has kept the eye busy for seven scenes, stills it once. The madhouse is the last of the rooms in which he is looked at, and the ladies who come to Bedlam close the circuit of spectacle the levee opened.
There is no return and no father’s house. The prodigal son’s story is the series’ structure, and it is told without its ending; the faithful woman who has followed him, refused and returning, holds him at the last and is not seen by him. All eight paintings survive together, where those of the Harlot are lost; the plates were issued and reissued, reworked in 1763, and survive in many impressions. The topical surface, the court days, the named persons, the Fleet, is fixed to its decade. The structure has outlived it.
The series stands at 8.2, in Tier IV. Fragonard’s The Swing (7.8) loses to it on The Unconcealment, The Archetypal Deep, The Swerve, The Living Form, The Bottomless Well, Pressure on Tradition and The Encompassed, and wins The Inevitable, The Sublime and The Made. Goya’s The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (8.6), a single plate, wins ten axes, the cycle only The Encompassed. The Threepenny Opera (8.4), a satire of a city run on money, wins four and loses five. Tom Jones (8.7), Fielding’s comic history of a young man’s progress through English institutions, wins eleven of twelve and stands level on The Imperishable: the novel holds the inner life the eight pictures leave outside. In the madhouse the chained man is still held, and still looked at.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on the eight as a chain. Each fall is required. Remove the arrest and the rescue that ties Sarah Young to him goes, and with it the meaning of the marriage, where she stands at the back of the church with his child while he marries money. Remove the gaming house and the second fortune is never lost; remove the Fleet and Bedlam arrives without its cause. The first scene is required by the whole: the hoard that makes him. What yields is the middle of the first half. The levee and the tavern are both scenes of spending and display, and the series would lose colour more than logic without one of them. Within scenes much is permitted rather than compelled: the chain is compelled, its density partly accumulation.
Score: 8.0 / 10
What is brought into the open can be stated, and it is a social condition, not a mood. Money in this London is a current that passes through a man and does not stay: hoarded by the father, spent on tutors, gardeners and whores, lost at the tables, recovered by marrying an old woman’s fortune, lost again. Each institution it passes through is shown as a mechanism that feeds on it: the levee’s professions, the tavern, the bailiffs, the church, the gaming house, the debtors’ prison, and last the madhouse, where the fashionable come to look. Held at the gate and not above it because the frame is a stated moral, the prodigal punished, which the images often illustrate rather than test, and because the condition is disclosed in the city around Tom more than in him.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The lowest of the twelve, and what holds it there is the series’ mode: satire keeps the eye busy, and elevation needs the eye stilled. One scene reaches height. In Bedlam, Tom, half naked and chained, is held by Sarah in a pose that recalls a deposition or a pietà, and the comedy of the madhouse round him turns to horror. The gaming house has a moment of dreadful energy in the ruined man on his knees, his wig gone and his fist raised; the Fleet has pathos in Sarah’s faint. Elsewhere there is wit, abundance and the pleasure of reading, not elevation. One full height at the end of a long run without it is what the axis places low, and the figure is not compensated by the series’ other strengths.
Score: 6.8 / 10
The archetype is the prodigal son, and here it is built, not alluded to: the whole series is its structure, inheritance, riotous living and ruin, with one essential difference. There is no return and no father’s house, only the madhouse. The fall is shaped as a descent through stations, and the woman who follows him, refused and returning, is the old figure of the redeeming beloved whom the fallen man cannot see. The particulars stay particular: a real tavern, a real street on a court day, the Fleet, Bethlem. Held below the gate because the myth is moral exemplum more than tragedy. Tom is a type, as his name says, and the archetype carries a lesson as much as a fate; the pietà in Bedlam is built, the larger frame of damnation evoked.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The decisive departure in Hogarth’s art came three years before this work. A Harlot’s Progress (1732) was the first of the modern moral subjects: a painted and engraved narrative of a contemporary London life in sequence, outside history painting and outside Dutch genre both. The Rake extends that departure: a male protagonist, eight scenes rather than six, a wider sweep of institutions, a structure of two falls. The stake was real, a subscription and an issue timed to a new law, a large commercial and legal wager, but it was laid on a market the earlier series had already proved. The turn deepens a path its maker had cut himself, and it is charged for coming second.
Score: 7.7 / 10
Substitute a different form and much goes. The knowledge is serial: a life is a sequence of places through which money passes, each ruining a little more, and only separate pictures can show this, since each scene is a room or a street that holds the man for a moment and lets him go. The interval between scenes is part of the meaning: what happened between the arrest and the marriage, or the tables and the prison, the viewer supplies, and the supplying is the moral reading. The engraving is part of the form too: a print for many, reversed from the painting, legible at arm’s length, captioned with verses. Sarah at the edge of five scenes is a thread no single picture could carry. Held below the top because each scene is composed on a stage plan, and much could be told almost as well in a novel.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Evidence over promise: nearly three centuries of reading. The series has been mined for its documentary London, its inscriptions and its pictures within pictures, for its topical allusions and the real people found among the levee’s figures; for its relation to the theatre; for its place in Hogarth’s campaign for English art; for its politics of credit, gaming and luxury; for its madness and the visit to Bedlam. It keeps yielding detail on return, and the later state of the plates and the differences between paintings and prints add a layer. Held below the top because the yield is chiefly iconographic: once the details are read, the meaning is the moral the series states, and the disagreement over its centre is narrower than for works whose centre is open.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The field is English painting and printmaking of the 1730s. Intrinsic force: with the Harlot, the series founded a kind, the modern moral subject in sequence, which no British painting before had attempted, and it put English satire on the walls and in the print shops of a broad public; through its timing it is tied to the first legal protection of an artist’s designs in Britain. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Hogarth’s own Marriage A-la-Mode and Industry and Idleness; the graphic satire of Rowlandson and Gillray; serial narrative in prints; Fielding’s prose; and, taking this series as structure and title, Ninette de Valois’s ballet The Rake’s Progress (1935), Stravinsky’s opera (1951), Hockney’s etchings (1961 to 1963) and Grayson Perry’s tapestries (2012). Discounted because the founding move belongs to the lost Harlot paintings.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about two hundred and ninety years. Form: whole. All eight paintings survive together, where the Harlot’s paintings are lost; the plates were issued and reissued and survive in many impressions, so the work exists in both its forms. Presence: the prints have circulated continuously since 1735, and the paintings, after private ownership, have hung for over two centuries in the Soane Museum, on view in the picture room. Fabric: the ordinary history of oils of the period, with no loss known that touches the image. The satire’s surface is fixed to its moment in its topical details, court days, named persons, the Fleet, and the axis charges that; the structure has outlived them. The figure sits toward the lower part of what centuries with form whole earn.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Judged as command of oil on canvas at cabinet scale and of the engraved line, to the same anchors as every medium. The making is strong where it narrates: the staging of each room for legibility, the placing of a protagonist in a crowd so that he reads at once, the gestures (the kneeling gambler, the faint in the Fleet, the chained man in Bedlam), the pictures within pictures that comment on the action. The costs are plain. The compositions are crowded and staged like the theatre’s flats; the drawing of figures is at times stiff or caricatured; the colour is serviceable rather than load-bearing; and the painted surface does not reach the refinement Hogarth reached a decade later in Marriage A-la-Mode. Strong command, not at the top of the medium.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the miser father’s dark, hoarding house in the first scene and the bright, crowded madhouse in the eighth. One law holds them: everything in this world is governed by money and display, and every room is a market where the man is weighed. The hoard becomes the levee, the levee the tavern, the tavern the debt, the debt the marriage, the marriage the table, the table the prison, the prison the madhouse; and the ladies who come to Bedlam to look close the circuit of spectacle the levee opened. Sarah is the one figure outside the law, who gives and asks nothing, and her place at the edge is consistent: the law is shown by its exception. Held below the top because some detail obeys the law of the joke rather than the work.
Score: 8.4 / 10
For a cycle of eight cabinet pictures, many orders are held, and the current of money integrates them. The family: the father’s hoard, the seduced and abandoned woman, the child, the mercenary marriage. Labour and the professions: tailors, tutors, a gardener, a jockey, bailiffs, gamblers, prisoners at their schemes. The state and the law: the court day, the arrest, the debtors’ prison. The sacred: the church and its marriage of convenience, and the figure of the pietà in Bedlam. Consciousness: madness itself, in the last scene and in the cell beside him. The city: its taverns, streets and institutions. They are held, not listed, because one man’s ruin passes through each. What the form cannot hold is the inner life: Tom is a type, seen from outside. High for a visual work; the form’s ceiling is recorded, not compensated.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.2 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.2, with The Unconcealment, The Living Form and Pressure on Tradition at 8.5. Eight paintings surviving together and a print in continuous circulation since 1735; an economy of institutions disclosed as mechanisms that feed on a man, and madness shown as a public spectacle; a serial form that only separate pictures in an order could carry, with the interval between them part of the meaning; and a kind founded, the modern moral subject in sequence, its reach named in ballet, opera, etching and tapestry.
Limiting Dimension
The Sublime at 6.8: satire keeps the eye busy, and the series rises once, fully, in Bedlam, at the end of a long run without elevation. Below the rest besides, The Swerve at 7.7, the departure already made three years before in the Harlot, and The Encompassed at 7.9, many orders held with the inner life left outside. The three are one fact: the series is a moral narrative told from outside its man, by a method its maker had already proved.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.0 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.5, The Made at 8.2, The Inner Law at 8.4, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on two of five: The Imperishable at 9.2 clears the bar of 8.5, and The Unconcealment and Pressure on Tradition meet it exactly at 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 8.3 falls two tenths short and The Swerve at 7.7 eight tenths, the myth a moral exemplum more than a fate, the departure made first in the Harlot. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Sublime, 6.8, below 7.5; no other axis it counts falls below 7.7, The Swerve. The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.9. Three of the five summit conditions are met. The twelve sum to 98.2, an average of 8.18 that displays 8.2, in Tier IV, two tenths above the 8.0 at which it begins and short of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the engravings and of the paintings in reproduction, scene by scene, not from standing before the canvases; no image or written source was consulted, and no words of the painter’s are quoted. The work scored is A Rake’s Progress by William Hogarth: the eight paintings in oil on canvas, made about 1732 to 1734, with the eight engravings Hogarth published from them in June 1735, as one work. The paintings are the object judged for The Made and for the image; the engravings belong to the work because they were its intended public form, issued by subscription and timed to the Engravers’ Copyright Act of 1735, which Hogarth had pressed for. The paintings are in Sir John Soane’s Museum, London. The later state of the plates, reworked in 1763, is context, as are A Harlot’s Progress, Marriage A-la-Mode and the ballet, opera, etchings and tapestries that took the series as their structure; none is scored. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the dimensions of the canvases and of the plates, the year the paintings entered the Soane collection, the church in which the marriage is set, the details changed in the later state, the names of the real people identified among the levee’s figures, the particular madmen in the last scene, smaller details of the first, fifth and sixth scenes, the fate of the Harlot’s paintings beyond their loss, and the handling of the paint on the canvases, which is not weighed above the design.