Print shows an interior view of a room; a duke has arrived home drunk at 5 a.m. (as shown on the longcase clock beside the door) accompanied by two attendants and watchman only to find his bedchamber occupied by another man. Through the open curtains around the bed can be seen a bare-breasted duchess. On the floor near the bed is an open book, “Memoirs of a woman of pleasure” (a reference to John Cleland’s Fanny Hill …) beside the chamber pot. As the duke with sword drawn, staggers forward, his rival climbs through a window in the background, leaving his clothes behind on a chair. A monkey dashes onto the table near the window on the heels of the husband’s rival but pulls down the tablecloth causing the items on the table to be strewn across the floor in the foreground; a book opened to pages “Chastity in the nobility a farce. Dedicated to their Graces the Duke & Dutchess xxx”, breaking a broken mirror, and sending the bottles and jars onto the floor. The bottles have labels “Viper drops” and “Surfeit water” and the jar is labeled “Lip salve”.
- Title: High life at five in the morning [graphic].
- Publication: [London] : [publisher not identified], publish’d according to act of Parliament, May 1st, 1769.
769.05.01.01+
Acquired February 2022
A crowd of rotund stock brokers sit and stand around a table and against a wall with a clock. The broker centered in the front reads from a copy of the Gazette Extraordinary while some of the others peer over his shoulders looking for news, many where glasses and one uses a glass to read the print on the page. To his left at the table is a broker holding bank stock in his right hand, and another broker knocking over a bottle of Madeira at the table.
A copy after Hogarth’s print “Gin Lane” that first issued in 1751, with seven lines of text in letterpress below image warning of the evils of drinking gin: “The sin of drunkenness expels reason, drowns memory, distempers the body, defaces beauty … the root of all evil is drunkenness!
Copy in reverse of the first state of Plate 3 of Hogarth’s ‘The Rake’s Progress’ (Paulson 134): A room at the Rose Tavern, Drury Lane (after the painting at Sir John Soane’s Museum); to left, Tom, surrounded by prostitutes and clearly drunk, sprawls on a chair with his foot on the table; one young woman embraces him and steals his watch, another spits a stream of gin across the table to the amusement of a young black woman standing in the background; one woman drinks from the punchbowl; another is removing her clothes in order to perform “postures”; to the right, a harpist and a door through which enters a man holding a large dish and a candle, and a pregnant ballad singer holding a sheet lettered “Black Joke”; on the walls hang a map of the world to which a young woman holds a candle and framed prints of Roman emperors, all (except that of Nero) damaged. A second version of the paintings is at the Atkins Museum (Kansas City, Missouri).