Marriage A-la-Mode: 4, The Toilette

The fourth scene of Hogarth’s Marriage A-la-Mode takes place in the wife’s bedroom. She is now Countess: an Earl’s coronet above the bed informs us that the Earl of Squander must have died and that the young couple have lost no time displaying their new rank.The Countess is sitting at her dressing table, the mirror of which is also surmounted with a coronet. She is following the aristocratic French fashion of receiving visitors during the final stage of her toilette (morning grooming ritual). Her hairdresser tests the heat of his curling tongs on a piece of paper. A coral baby’s teether hangs from the back of the Countess’s chair, indicating that she is now a mother and that she sees her child occasionally, though it does not appear until the final scene. The Countess does not look at herself in the mirror – she only has eyes for her lover Silvertongue, who demonstrates his lack of manners and his privileged place in the house by putting his feet up on the sofa.An opera singer, probably modelled on a famous Italian castrato singer, and his flautist entertain the Countess’s guests while a manservant offers them cups of chocolate. A painting after Michelangelo’s Rape of Ganymede above the man with horn-shaped curling papers in his hair may suggest his homosexuality – it shows Jupiter in the form of an eagle abducting the beautiful young hero Gandymede. A large portrait of Silvertongue is prominently displayed beside the Countess’s bed. On the other wall, above the Countess, are two paintings after Correggio. Io throws her head back in ecstasy in the embrace of Jupiter disguised as a cloud, and Lot’s daughters get him drunk so he will sleep with them and perpetuate the human race. A collection of visiting and playing cards lie scattered on the floor from new aristocratic acquaintances inviting the Countess to various events.Turning her back on her visitors, the Countess listens only to Silvertongue, who offers her a ticket to a masquerade. He gestures with his other hand to a painted screen on which Hogarth has depicted a masquerade in progress. He points to a couple dressed as a friar and a nun, as though suggesting that he and the Countess should adopt those disguises. Masquerades had become increasingly popular from the early eighteenth centuryAs continuing evidence of her bad taste, the Countess’s recent purchases have been spread out before her, still bearing their auction lot numbers. She has purchased more items similar to those on the mantelpiece in Scene 2 and a dish decorated with Leda being seduced by Jupiter disguised as a swan. A little page boy holds a statue of Actaeon, whom the chaste goddess Diana transformed into a stag and then caused to be killed by his own hounds. The boy laughs as he points at Actaeon’s antlers, which represent the horns of a cuckold (the husband of a woman who commits adultery) as the Countess has proved her husband to be.