A rake's progress. Plate 2. The Levée.

<em>A Rake's Progress</em> is a series of eight paintings by William Hogarth. The canvases were produced in 1732-33, then engraved and published in 1735. Te Papa has the set of eight engravings. The series shows the decline and fall of Tom Rakewell, the spendthrift son and heir of a rich merchant, who comes to London, wastes all his money on luxurious living, prostitution and gambling, and as a consequence is imprisoned in the Fleet Prison and ultimately the notorious Bethlem Hospital, or Bedlam. The original paintings are in Sir John Soane's Museum, London, where they are normally on display. The filmmaker Alan Parker has described the works as an ancestor to the storyboard.

In Plate 2, Tom is at his morning levée, a fashionable French-influenced aristocratic practice (an audience with visitors and tradesmen), in his luxury London lodgings, attended by musicians and other hangers-on, all dressed in expensive costumes. It looks as if Tom has only recently woken up. His lifestyle contrasts graphically with the miserly manner in which his father lived but is viewed by Hogarth equally disapprovingly. The crowd of people vying for Tom’s attention (and money) including those in the adjoining room, is meant to appear absurd, satirising both the taste and entertainments associated with high society and members of the middle class, like Tom, who indiscriminately aspire to it. Indeed, his lack of judgement and pursuit of pleasure will be his undoing.

Surrounding Tom from left to right: a music master at a harpsichord, who was supposed to represent the famous composer George Frederick Handel; a fencing master; a quarterstaff instructor; a dancing master with a violin; the landscape gardener Charles Bridgeman; an ex-soldier offering to be a bodyguard; a bugler of a fox hunt club. At the lower right is a jockey with a silver trophy. The quarterstaff instructor looks disapprovingly on both the fencing and dancing masters. Both masters appear to be in the "French" style, which Hogarth loathed. On the walls are paintings of roosters, emblems of cockfighting.

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Rake's_Progress

Dr Mark Stocker, Curator Historical International Art                             November 2016