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| Lubaina Himid; A Fashionable Marriage, 1986; Installation view, 2021 (c) Tate Modern; Photo: Sonal Bakrania |
Marriage A-la-Mode: 4, The Toilette
by William Hogarth
Dr Francesco Ventrella
At a first glance, William Hogarth’s La Toilette, the fourth painting in his series Marriage A-LaMode seems to offer very little to queer art history, given that the title itself ostensibly invites us to reflect on the heterosexual institution of marriage, or rather its deterioration under the negative influence of the modern ways. Freshly widowed, the Countess, has in fact made a new family of fashionable entertainers and sycophants.
While Silvertongue is intent on flirting with her on one side of the room, (inviting to a maskerade)
on the other Hogarth introduces us to two recognisably queer figures of his era, a macaroni with curling papers in his hair, and a castrato singer accompanied by his flautist.
Above them a painting after Michelangelo’s Rape of Ganymede alerts us to the artistic tastes of this queer party, but also to a historical shift, occurring in the 18th century, about the perception of homosexuality from sin to a lifestyle.
The fourth scene of Hogarth’s Marriage A-la-Mode takes place in the wife’s bedroom. Now a Countess, she is following the aristocratic French fashion of receiving visitors as she finishes getting dressed. A coral baby’s teether hanging from the back of her chair indicates that she has become a mother. The Countess does not look at herself in the mirror – she only has eyes for her lover Silvertongue, who offers her a ticket to a masquerade.
An opera singer and his flautist entertain the Countess’s guests while a manservant offers them cups of chocolate. A little page boy holds a statue of Actaeon, whom the chaste goddess Diana transformed into a stag and then caused to be killed by his own hounds. The boy laughs as he points at Actaeon’s antlers, which represent the horns of a cuckold (the husband of a woman who commits adultery) as the Countess has proved her husband to be.
