Marriage A-la-Mode: 4, The Toilette

The levée

Start with the man on the sofa. He has his shoes off, he is lying down at a reception, and nobody seems to mind. Hold that question; the room will answer it. A levée was a morning reception, held while you dressed, and only the very grand held them. The Countess is holding one. That she is now a Countess you can tell from the coronets: one over the bed, one over the mirror. The old Earl has died between the third room and this one, the Viscount is now the Earl, and his wife has come into her title and started spending it.

Hogarth called the picture The Toilette, the dressing hour, and it is the fullest of the six, with a dozen people and a hundred objects, so treat it as what it is: a programme. Here is who came, what they did, and what it all meant.

The music

The entertainment is an Italian singer, large, jewelled and in a fur-trimmed coat, singing from a book with his mouth wide open while a flautist plays behind him. Castrati were the most expensive performers in London, and having one at your levée was the height of fashion. In front of him a young man in blue, his hair in curl papers, drinks his chocolate and admires him; behind, a country gentleman with a whip has fallen asleep.

The lady in white in the middle of the room has fainted with delight, her arms open and her head back. Hogarth had heard people react to Italian opera like this and thought it absurd, and he paints her with real affection and no mercy. Everyone on the left side of the room is looking at the singer. Nobody is looking at the Countess.

The conversation

The Countess, in yellow, is having her hair dressed and is not listening to the music. She is listening to the man on the sofa. It is Silvertongue, the lawyer from Room 1, now entirely at home, lying back with his shoes off the floor and pointing over his shoulder at a folding screen painted with a masquerade. In his other hand is a ticket. The invitation is to the masquerade, where everyone wears a mask, and the National Gallery reads the whole exchange exactly as the artist intended: he is arranging to meet her there.

Above their heads hang the paintings she has bought, and they are the room's commentary. On the left, Correggio's Jupiter and Io, a god disguised as a cloud seducing a girl. On the right, Lot made drunk by his daughters. Above Silvertongue's own head, where you cannot see it in this crop, is a portrait of Silvertongue. She bought that too.

The auction lot

On the floor at the right is a basket of things bought at auction that morning, with the catalogue beside it: china, a tray, small ornaments of the kind the Earl's steward will not be able to pay for. Hogarth's audience recognised the sale rooms of Covent Garden in this, and the fashion for buying imported rubbish at a premium.

Among the purchases a page boy in a turban has picked out a china figure of Actaeon, the hunter who was turned into a stag, and points at the horns on its head, laughing. Horns, in 1743, were the sign of a cuckold. The boy is the only person in the room who has understood what is going on, and he is a child.

What The Toilette means

This is the room where the marriage becomes a performance. In Room 2 the Countess stretched in an empty house. Now she has an audience, a title, a lawyer on the sofa and a ticket in her future, and she has bought a whole culture to go with it: Italian music, French hair, imported paintings, auction china. Hogarth despised most of it, and the picture is as much about London's taste as about her.

But the plot is in the corner. The ticket in Silvertongue's hand is for a masquerade, and a masquerade needs a mask, and a mask needs somewhere to go afterwards. The next room is that somewhere, and it is lit by a single candle.

The original hangs with the other five in the National Gallery in London, where the series has been since the Gallery opened in 1824. Our hand-painted reproduction of The Toilette 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. More Hogarth in our William Hogarth collection.