A Rake's Progress, plate 5, 1735

William Hogarth (1697 - 1764)

RA Collection: Art

Plate five of William Hogarth's set of eight engravings A Rake's Progress. As for many of Hogarth's best-known engravings, the set was based on preexisting paintings by the printmaker, painted in 1734 and now in Sir John Soane's Museum, London. The image is reversed from the painting.

The set, made as a sequel to Hogarth's Harlot's Progress, was the artist's second 'modern moral subject'. It tells the story of a young man of modest means, Tom Rakewell, coming into an inheritance and entering fashionable London life before succumbing to financial ruin and madness. In this plate Tom, shown in the previous plate (17/3788) in debt and pursued by bailiffs, marrying a wealthy old woman in Marylebone Old Church. Sarah Young, whose child he has fathered (see plates 1 and 4 of the set) and her mother attempt to enter the church and prevent the marriage.

This impression is from the first state of the plate, although this plate was revised less than others in the series, making it more difficult to tell one state from another.