What marks the difference between an image and a text? Do we read them differently? Is it just that images are pictures and taken in at a glance, while texts tell us stories? What about a series of images that tell us a story in equally precise detail–such as William Hogarth’s Marriage à-la-mode series from 1743? In this series, Hogarth (1697-1764) satirizes the aristocracy who squandered money on importing foreign goods, using an overwhelming level of visual detail to convey his point. In many ways, Hogarth’s images must be read like a text, an easy task for his contemporary middle-class viewers accustomed to his iconographic “grammar.” Steeped in traditions of the English theater that he regularly went to see as well as the circulating texts of his time, Hogarth used visual cues of dress, posture, color, and object placement to convey his messages about the state of the English nobility parading around in French dress and attending scandalous events such as masquerades. [1] As he later wrote in his Analysis of Beauty of 1753, “action is a sort of language which perhaps one time or other, may come to be taught by a kind of grammar-rules; but, at present, is only got by rote and imitation.” [2]
We, the viewers, “read” Hogarth’s series as a visual text that follows a narrative structure. Visual symbols carry connotations as words do, and as Aileen Ribeiro writes, “throughout the series Hogarth uses clothing, as he does furnishings and paintings on the walls to ‘point a moral and adorn a tale.’” [3] In the opening of Marriage, Hogarth introduces us to his cast of characters, with every aspect carefully coded to convey meaning. The scene’s lighting draws us to the gown of the unhappy Viscountess, wringing her handkerchief in her hands, but she fades in comparison to her husband’s peacock colors as he admires himself in the mirror. Her slumped posture and downturned mouth display her resignation. Next to her, facing away, sits her new husband, the Earl, whose impeccable white wig echoes the white gown. His elaborate French-style three-piece suit and her gown combine with their separate postures to convey a description. It is clear they are a couple from the decadent, brocaded floral patterns that carry through both their outfits and their close sitting position. They face away, however, showing us that the pair is linked unwillingly, echoing the chained dogs in front of them. Other details are also revealed, such as the Earl’s syphilis (indicated by the sore on his neck) and the Viscountess’s introduction to her eventual lover. Not only does Hogarth introduce his story, he foreshadows other events (see The Inspection and The Bagnio). All of these attributes are revealed in two figures in just one of the six paintings.
Texts play their own significant role as important identifiers, beginning with The Marriage Contract. Other visual and textual clues include the open music book on the floor in The Tête à Tête, the masquerade invitation in Silvertongue’s hand in the The Toilette, and the newspaper at the Viscountess’s feet in The Lady’s Death. Text is used not only to communicate between the characters, but also to the viewers of the works. Hogarth’s pictures have been linked to English novelists of his time such as Henry Fielding and Tobias Smollett. [4] Viewers become witnesses to the scenes Hogarth depicts, like secondary characters in a novel.
If the process of identifying iconography in order to understand meaning is not a sort of reading similar to that of text, then what is it? Coded meanings carry through images and texts, and each form produces similar cultural meanings; these are, of course, fraught with their own ambiguities and connotations. [5] Perhaps it is time to put aside the perceived gap between image and text and instead examine the ways in which they function similarly. Even William Hogarth sought to allow his English viewers to “judge as freely of Painting as they do of Poetry.” [6]
Written by Caitlin Link, 2014
Hogarth’s Marriage à-la-mode series is housed in The National Gallery, London, England.
[1] Mary Klinger Lindberg, “Dramatic Analogues in William Hogarth’s ‘Marriage A-la-Mode,’” in Hogarth in Context: Ten Essays and a Bibliography, ed. Joachim Möller (Marburg: Jonas Verlag, 1996), 72.
[2] William Hogarth, Analysis of Beauty, ed. Charles Davis (London: John Reeves, 1753), 107.
[3] Aileen Ribeiro, “Reading Dress in Hogarth’s Marriage a la Mode,” Apollo 143, no. 432 (1998), 49.
[4] Pamela Cantrell, “Writing the Picture: Fielding, Smollett, and Hogarthian Pictorialism.“ Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 24 (1995), 72.
[5] W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 14.
[6] Timothy Erwin, “William Hogarth and the Aesthetics of Nationalism.” Huntington Library Quaterly 64, no. ¾ (2001), 387.
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