A rake's progress. Plate 7. The prison

item details

NameA rake's progress. Plate 7. The prison

ProductionWilliam Hogarth; 1735

Classificationprints, engravings, works on paper

Materialspaper

Materials Summaryengraving

Techniquesengraving

DimensionsImage: 353 (height), 405 (length)

Registration Number1965-0001-1/7-8

Credit lineGift of Sir John Ilott, 1965

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 prints. 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 7 takes place in the interior of the Fleet debtors' prison, where Hogarth's own father had been incarcerated. Tom sits dumbfounded to the right. The letter beside him tells us that his attempt to earn money by writing a play has been rejected by the publisher. His elderly, one-eyed wife (whom he opportunistically married in Plate 5) threatens him, angry at Tom's squandering of her fortune, while a boy with a glass of beer and a gaoler wait impatiently for the money that is owed them. To the left, Sarah Young has fainted at the sight of the ruined Tom Rakewell. Two women try to revive her with salts while her now considerably older daughter scolds her, demanding to leave this deplorable place.

Tom's two roommates foretell his own, final fate. To the extreme left, a dishevelled, heavily bearded man has concocted a "Scheme for paying ye Debts of ye Nation", but cannot pay his own. Hogarth's feckless father had also put forward such a scheme. In the background to the right, an alchemist, complete with his nightcap and instruments, is probably working at a forge, determined to find a way to turn base metal into gold. Both roommates are thoroughly mad. A telescope for celestial observation pokes out of the barred window, an apparent reference to the Longitude rewards offered by the British government, yet another forlorn hope of the cell inmates, probably that of the alchemist.

Dr Mark Stocker, Curator Historical International Art November 2016