A Rake's Progress, plate 7, 1735

William Hogarth (1697 - 1764)

RA Collection: Art

Plate seven 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 exhausted his financial resources, is in the Fleet, the debtors' prison. His wife, whose money he gambled away, rages at him. Tom's former lover (and mother of his child) Sarah Young, come to visit him, faints on the left.



This impression is from the third state of the plate, which differs from the fourth (last) state only in lacking some crosshatching applied later.