A Rake's Progress, plate 6, 1735

William Hogarth (1697 - 1764)

RA Collection: Art

Plate six 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, having married a wealthy old woman in the previous plate (17/3789) curses his fate, having gambled away the last of his assets (legally a wife's posessions became her husband's property on marriage).