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
Copy (reversed) of the first state of Plate 8 of Hogarth’s ‘The Rake’s Progress’ (Paulson 139), after the painting at Sir John Soane’s Museum.: A scene in Bedlam with Tom half-naked and in a state of distress attended by Sarah Young, a clergyman, and a warder; in the background, an inmate who believes himself to be God has cheap prints of saints pinned to his cell wall. Two elegantly dressed female visitors whisper together, the one holding a fan against her face to shield from her view an inmate in a cell who believes he is King and sits naked, save for a crown, urinating on his straw bed. The wall and the banister of a staircase to the right are covered with various graffiti including calculations of longitude.
Copy in reverse of the first state of Plate 5 of Hogarth’s ‘The Rake’s Progress’ (Paulson 136): Tom and a wealthy old woman are being married in the dilapidated church of St. Marylebone. The bride has only one eye and growths on her forehead; the IHS on the wall behind her serve as a mock halo. In contrast the old woman is attended by a beautiful young woman who has already caught Tom’s eye. In the background on the left, the elderly pew opener pushes Sarah Young, carrying Tom’s child in her arms, and Sarah’s mother; she shakes her keys in their faces to prevent them from entering the church to stop the marriage. Two dogs in the lower left of the image mirror the courtship of Tom and his bride; the courted dog has only one eye. The clergyman is assisted at the altar by a clerk, and a charity-boy kneels at the bride’s feet offering a hassock. The Poor Box on the left is covered with a cobweb; there is a crack down the center of the slab with the Commandments on the wall behind the clergyman.
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).
Copy in reverse of the first state of Plate 4 of Hogarth’s ‘The Rake’s Progress’ (Paulson 135): In this scene two baliffs, one with an arrest notice in his hand, have stopped Tom Rakewell’s sedan chair in St. James’s Street; Tom is presumably on his way to White’s gaming house which can be seen in the background. They are foiled in their attempt to arrest Tom for debt as Sarah Young, the young woman whom he had seduced and abandoned, offers the bailiffs her purse instead. Sarah is now a dealer in millinery as is suggested by the notions falling from her purse. In the right foreground a shoe-black apparently taking advantage of the situation to take hold of Tom’s elegant walking stick. Above them a careless lamplighter spills some oil on Tom’s head. To the left a Welshman, probably the creditor, honouring St David’s day (March 1st) with a leek in his hat, accompanied by his manicured dog, simply watches the scene. In the distance is the gate of St James’s Palace with a crowd of sedan-chairs approaching to celebrate the birthday of Queen Caroline.
Copy (not reversed) of the first state of Plate 2 of Hogarth’s ‘The Rake’s Progress’ (Paulson 133): a fashionable interior with Tom, in elegant indoor dress, surrounded by tradesmen vying for his custom: a poet, a wigmaker, a tailor, a musician (with a list of presents given by aristocrats to the popular castrato, Farinelli), a fencing master (said to be named Dubois), a prizefighter with quarter-staffs (said to be James Figg), a dancing master (John Essex?), a landscape-gardener (said to be Charles Bridgeman), a bodyguard, a huntsman and a jockey.–British Museum online catalogue.