Object annotation #3.

"A Rake's Progress" - William Hogarth (1/8)

Context This painting is called “The Heir” and it is a part of an eight-part series made by Restoration artist William Hogarth. The entire collection is titled “A Rake’s Progress” (made in 1732). In my English class, we read John Dryden's Marriage-a-la-mode which Hogarth actually illustrated from book form! After doing additional research into his work, I found this set. The characters in view include Tom Rakewell (the man standing in the middle), his tailor (kneeling), his lawyer / treasurer (to his right), Sarah Young (far left), and Young’s mother (right of Sarah, facing Tom). To provide context, Tom and Sarah were lovers, but Tom has just received a large sum of money from his late father. The role of the lawyer is to count this money, but he is clearly taking some of the coins for himself as the tailor and two women are distracting Tom. Meanwhile, Tom is reaching out his hand to offer Sarah gold coins to recompense for leaving her and their baby. Sarah feels betrayed and is distraught, holding her promise ring from him, while her mother is clearly aggrieved, denying the money. Tom’s surname, “Rakewell”, is a play on the term “rake”, which means “a man who was habituated to immoral conduct” or one “wasting his fortune on gambling, wine, women, and song, and incurring lavish debts in the process.” (Wikipedia) This personality type was often found in restoration poetry of the time. Bollard talks about the connection between painting and poetry on page 320. Comparing three piece of art, she claims “the love remains unfulfilled, grounded in vision but unredeemed by touch”. I like when she says: “there is a structural similarity in the transfor-mations that occur in poetic and pictorial acts of mimesis: painting, like poetry, operates figurally, metaphorically, trans-forming a flat surface into a fully three-dimensional world in a feat of illusion that is ultimately completed in the internal vision of the viewer's imagination. Poetry also depends on figuration to transform the world through a mimetic act; it does this by employing metaphorical (rather than literal) language-words that are traslati (transferred) or trasportati (transported; "taken," as one sixteenth-century poetics ex-plains it, "from their proper signification and placed in another”. (Bollard, 320) In our reading on tactility, Sharon Assaf alludes to how gender roles and these characters can display virtuosity, (in this case, seduction seen as a vice), referencing Aristotle, "who equated touch with perception". (Assaf 83)

Style The role of touch in this painting demonstrates betrayal to me. Not only between Rakewell and Sarah but also the background characters as well. To an uninformed eye, the tailor is simply fixing and stitching up Rakewell’s suit and the lawyer is expected to be counting money. However, taking a closer look, you can see that this lawyer is stealing the coins out of Rakewell’s bag. In the story, Rakewell has recently inherited money from his father and is no longer interested in marrying Sarah, who at the time is also carrying his child. The woman with the angry face is Sarah’s mother, defending her daughter. On Sarah’s hand there is a marriage ring and along her waist you can see letters— to indicate the love notes she and Rakewell shared before he changed his mind on their relationship. Rakewell is hoping to exchange this newly acquired familial wealth for their love, as evidenced by his hand reaching out with coins to pay her off. In a literal sense, the artist shows tactility through a paintbrush on canvas, but figuratively there is more to this. In visiting the art exhibit during our class "field trip", and learning about tactile prints in the group presentation, I learned that you can feel emotions within the painting by simply looking and perceiving. This painting has a hazy quality (similarly found in the wooden prints) so I do not feel that the artist had to use as firm of brush strokes when creating; meanwhile, in the embroidery bulbs, the artist had to stab into the thread to make the wording stitches, showing a difference in intention in haptics.

Subject In class, we talked about the juxtaposition between desire and artifice. In Hogarth’s painting, the woman, Sarah’s mother (on the left) is feeling the effect of the man touching her even though their bodies never actually touch. In this way their bodies are still sensible without intercorporeal engagement. The study of haptics shows how emotions can be grasped, through the concept of proprioception. The mother is aware of her body in relation to Rakewell’s— not wanting to make contact-- and is able to shift away from his proposal, clearly in disgust. (319) Bollard forwards this idea by saying that characters “are unattainable objects of desire, stirring the mind through vision whileremaining unavailable to erotic touch”. Sarah Young is an object of desire in this photo, but is anti-sensual of Rakewell. (321)