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Overview
A Rake's Progress is a series of eight paintings by William Hogarth. The canvases were produced in 1732-33, then engraved and published as engravings in 1735. Te Papa has the set of eight engravings. The series shows the decline and fall of Tom Rakewell, the spendthrift son and heir of a rich merchant, who comes to London, wastes all his money on luxurious living, prostitution and gambling, and as a consequence is imprisoned in the Fleet Prison and ultimately Bethlem Hospital, or Bedlam. The original paintings are in Sir John Soane's Museum, London, where they are normally on display. The filmmaker Alan Parker has described the works as an ancestor to the storyboard.
Plate 8, the final scene in the series, is set in Bethlem Hospital/ Bethlehem Royal Hospital (Bedlam), a notorious institution for London's insane and poor. Tom Rakewell is lying in the foreground, almost stripped of clothes and thus his social pretensions. The ever faithful Sarah Young weeps by his side, knowing that Tom is beyond her help. He continues to ignore her, just as he has done throughout the series. Their poses deliberately mimic the Dead Christ and the Virgin Mary in Pieta scenes. Like prisons and other hospitals, Bedlam was open at the time to paying visitors. Within this scene an aristocratic lady and her maid are standing towards the left, amused and disgusted by the antics of the unfortunate people around them. The irony is that while Tom had set out to mimic the aristocratic lifestyle in the earlier scenes, and might even have rubbed shoulders with the lady and maid, he finishes by being one of its entertainments and is unrecognisable to them.
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Rake's_Progress
Dr Mark Stocker, Curator Historical International Art November 2016