A rake's progress. Plate 3. The tavern scene.

A Rake's Progress is a series of eight paintings by William Hogarth. The canvases were produced in 1732–33, then engraved and published 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 the notorious 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 3 depicts a wild party or orgy underway at the Rose Tavern, an infamous brothel on Drury Lane; on the  left Tom, surrounded by prostitutes and clearly drunk, sprawls on a chair with his foot on the table; one young woman embraces him and steals his watch, another spits a stream of gin across the table to the amusement of a young black woman standing in the background, another woman drinks from the punchbowl, and yet another is removing her clothes in order to perform an obscene dance or 'postures' on the large tray, brought in behind her; to the right, a harpist and a door through which enter a man holding the tray and a pregnant ballad singer holding a sheet lettered "Black Joke"; on the walls hang a map of the world to which a young woman holds a candle and framed prints of Roman emperors, all of which (except that of the wicked Nero) are damaged or defaced. The parallels between this scene and the age of Nero, and the corresponding absence of Christian morals, are evident.

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Rake's_Progress

Dr Mark Stocker, Curator Historical International Art                                November 2016