The Tête à Tête

The Tête à Tête, oil painting, also known as Shortly After the Marriage, by English artist William Hogarth. It is the second of a sequence of six scenes in his Marriage A-la-Mode series, which was commissioned about 1743 to censure the marriage customs of the upper classes. In this series, Hogarth illustrates the all-too-common story of a young aristocratic woman who contracts syphilis from her arranged marriage.

One of the most influential figures in English art, Hogarth was a highly skilled portrait painter, engraver, satirist, critic, aesthetic philosopher, and editorial cartoonist. He was hired by Mary Edwards, a wealthy art patron, to educate society about the dangers of arranged marriages, wherein syphilis was only one among many possible horrid outcomes for young women forced to marry strangers to appease their parents’ mercenary desires. Edwards had herself managed to escape from an arranged marriage.

Hogarth’s original oil paintings were reproduced on copper plates, from which the series circulated in various publications. This scene depicts a couple engaged in an intimate morning in which their mutual disdain for each other and their separate social and sexual lives are very much in evidence. The drunken, bored lord still wears his hat and sword from the previous evening, while the wife stretches out before a table set for one. An exasperated steward leaves the scene after attempting to interest the couple in their flagging financial situation. While many of the iniquities of society Hogarth portrayed are still common today, the artist’s sensibility, insight, and talent remains a historical rarity.