Enlightenment

William Hogarth

Marriage A-la-Mode: 2, The Tête à Tête

about 1743

Oil on canvas, 27 1/2 × 35 3/4 in. The National Gallery, London

The second of six canvases made as models for engravings, the paintings to be sold once the prints were out: a story told in instalments.

Look at

• The room is split by an arch: the slumped couple fills the right, the steward walks out at the left, and the far room recedes between them.
• An overturned chair, open books and a sword on the floor scatter across the patterned carpet, moving the eye piece by piece.
• Pale pink, gold-green and dark blue-black sit side by side, in crisp, even light with no single focus.

• Engraved and published in 1745; John Lane paid Hogarth 120 guineas for all six in 1751.
• Bought with the Angerstein collection for the National Gallery in 1824; technical examination shows the table was first painted bare.

Image: Wikimedia Commons · Public domain