Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Hogarth's Works: With Life and Anecdotal Descriptions of His Pictures
The artist has adhered to his engagement: he has struck at an higher order, and displayed the follies and vices which frequently degrade our nobility. He has exhibited the prospect of a fashionable marriage, where the gentleman is attracted by riches, and the lady by ambition. That misery and destruction succeeded an union founded upon such principles is not to be wondered at; the progress of that misery, and the final destruction of the actors, is so delineated as to form a regular and well-divided tragedy. In the first act are represented five principal characters and three of them, by a regular chain of incidents naturally ?owing from each other, (all victims to their own vices. The young nobleman, for attempt ing to revenge the violation of his wife's virtue, which he never cherished, is killed by her paramour, who for this murder sufi'ers an ignominious death; and the lady, distracted at the re?ection of having been the cause of their lives terminating in so horrid a man ner, makes her own quietus with a dose of laudanum.
This is painting to the understanding, appealing to the heart, and making the pencil an advocate in the cause of morality. It is doing that poetical justice which our dramatists have sometimes neglected, and in which they have perhaps been justified by the common events of human life for it must be acknow ledged, that while virtue is frequently unfortunate, we often see vice successful. Notwithstanding this, those pictures are surely best calculated to encourage men in the practice of the social duties which display the evils consequent upon their violation. Whatever poetical justice may allow, morality demands that some examples should be held up to prove that the omission of a duty frequently leads to the per petration of a crime; and that crimes of so black a dye as are here represented, almost invariably ter minate in wretchedness, infamy, and death.
The original pictures were, on the 6th of June I 7 5d, purchased by Mr. Lane of Hillingdon, near Uxbridge, for one hundred and twenty guineas l - a price so in adequate to their merit, and to what it might have been fairly presumed they would have produced even at that time, that it becomes difficult to account for it in any other way than by supposing that the strange way in which Mr. Hogarth ordered the auction to be conducted puzzled the public, who, not exactly comprehending this new mode of bidding, declined attending or bidding at all.
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