Marriage A-la-Mode: 3, The Inspection

Where we left off

Room 2 ended on a question: what is the black mark on the husband's neck? Room 3 answers it, and the answer opens a door into one of the strangest rooms Hogarth ever painted.

The mark, explained

Here is the Viscount again, sitting in a chair with his legs apart, grinning, and there is the black spot on his neck, darker than ever. This time Hogarth tells us what it means. The National Gallery is plain about it: the black spot on the groom's neck shows that he has syphilis.

If you noticed the mark in Room 1 and wondered about it in Room 2, this is your reward. Hogarth built the series like a mystery, and the smallest clue in the first room turns out to be the most important.

Monsieur de la Pillule

We are in the consulting room of a French doctor, Monsieur de la Pillule, Mister Pill. He stands on the left, wiping his spectacles, with the lazy smile of a man who has seen everything and fixed nothing.

The Viscount has brought his own complaint. He holds out a little pill box and waves his cane. In the National Gallery's reading, he is protesting that the doctor's pills do not work. The pills are black, like the mark on his neck. They are mercury.

Mercury was the main treatment for syphilis in Hogarth's time, and it was poison. It made teeth loosen, gums rot and hair fall out, and it did not cure the disease. People had a grim joke for it: a night with Venus, a lifetime with Mercury.

The girl

Between the Viscount's knees stands a girl. She is very young. She presses a handkerchief to her mouth, and she holds a pill box too.

The National Gallery reads her as a patient too, brought here for treatment of the same disease. How she caught it, the painting does not say, and we should not pretend that it does. What it does show is a child in a doctor's room, standing next to a grown man who is laughing.

The woman with the knife

In the middle of the room stands a large woman in a red and black dress, and she is angry. Look at her hands. She is opening a folding knife.

Her face carries dark spots too. She wears a gold brocade that matches the girl's skirt, which is why the National Gallery suggests she is the girl's mother, and the one who brought her into the trade. The knife is real. What she means to do with it, Hogarth leaves open.

Do not trust the doctor

Now look harder at Monsieur de la Pillule. The National Gallery points out that the doctor himself shows the signs of the disease he claims to treat: a sunken bridge to his nose, a bulging forehead, thick lips, bent legs. The man selling the cure is a walking advertisement for the illness.

On the table at his side sits a human skull. The National Gallery notes that it shows the erosion the disease causes in bone. It is a strange thing to keep on your desk if you want your patients to feel hopeful.

A cabinet of curiosities

The longer you stay, the stranger the room gets. A narwhal tusk leans against the wall like a giant's walking stick. A carved head with goggling eyes and an open mouth hangs above the cabinet: an apothecary's shop sign, the National Gallery says.

On the right stand iron machines with wheels and screws and an open book of diagrams. The National Gallery says they were for setting dislocated shoulders, and for pulling corks. In the cabinet at the back, a skeleton leans towards an anatomical model as if making a pass at it. Hogarth is joking, but the joke is that sex and death are standing side by side in a cupboard.

The disease or the cure?

Room 1 was about money. Room 2 was about the evidence money leaves behind. Room 3 makes the story physical. The black mark is no longer a mystery: it is an illness, it has a treatment, and the treatment is poison handed out by a doctor who is ill himself, in a room full of skulls.

So which is more frightening here: the disease, or the cure?

The third room makes the consequences visible. The fourth goes back to the bride from Room 1. Her world has changed completely.

The original hangs in the National Gallery in London with the other five rooms. Our hand-painted reproduction of The Inspection is painted in oil on canvas from the National Gallery original, and the six scenes can be ordered singly or as a set to hang in order.

This is Room 3 of The Six Rooms of a Bad Marriage.