Marriage à-la-mode (Hogarth)
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 William Hogarth's Marriage A-la-Mode, c. 1743, Smarthistory
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Marriage A-la-Mode is a series of six pictures painted by William Hogarth between 1743 and 1745 depicting a pointed skewering of upper class 18th century society. This moralistic warning shows the disastrous results of an ill-considered marriage for money and satirises patronage and aesthetics. The pictures are exhibited in the National Gallery, London.
This series of paintings were not received as well as his other moral tales, A Harlot's Progress (1732) and A Rake's Progress (1735), and when they were finally sold in 1751, it would be for a much lower sum than the artist had hoped for.
In Marriage A-la-Mode, Hogarth challenges the traditional view that the rich live virtuous lives with a heavy satire on the notion of arranged marriages. In each piece, he shows the young couple and their family and acquaintances at their worst: engaging in affairs, drinking, gambling, and numerous other vices. This is regarded by many as his finest project, certainly the best example of his serially-planned story cycles.
These pictures were at first poorly received by the public, to the great disappointment of the artist. He sold them to a Mr. Lane of Hillington for one hundred and twenty guineas. The frames alone had cost Hogarth four guineas each, so his initial remuneration for painting this valuable series was only sixteen shillings over a hundred pounds. From Mr. Lane's estate, they became the property of his nephew, Colonel Cawthorn. In May 1796 they were sold by auction at Christie's, Pall Mall, for the sum of one thousand guineas; the purchaser was John Julius Angerstein. They are now owned by the British government and are part of the collection of the National Gallery.
It had been Hogarth's intention to follow the Marriage A-la-Mode series with a companion series called The Happy Marriage, however, this series was never completed and only exists as a series of unfinished sketches.
Although this series of paintings are works of art in their own right, their original purpose was to provide the subjects for the series of engraved copper plate prints. By the nature of the process, when engraving copper plates, the image engraved on the plate by the engraver is reversed, that is to say, a mirror image of the final print. Normally, when undertaking paintings that are to be engraved, the painting is produced the "right way round" — not reversed – and then the engraver views it in a mirror as he undertakes the engraving. Hogarth was an engraver himself and disliked this course of action using mirrors, so unusually, he produced the paintings for Marriage à-la-mode already reversed so the engraver could directly copy them.
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