“Plate from a pirated series of Hogarth’s Rake’s Progress, not based on one of the original prints: Covent Garden with St Paul’s church and the buildings at the north-western corner of the piazza; the Rake (here called Ramble) and drunken friends are accosting women passers-by and the watch has arrived to set about them with staves.”–British Museum online catalogue.
- Printmaker: Bowles, Thomas, II, active 1712-1767, printmaker.
- Title: He and his drunken companions raise a riot in Covent Garden [graphic].
- Publication: [London] : [John Bowles], [1735]
Hogarth 735.00.00.19+
Acquired January 2021
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).
