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Genuine, original William Hogarth engravings and etchings from Darvill's Rare Prints
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These two prints were executed from a set of paintings said to be commissioned "at the particular request of a certain vicious nobleman." Outside the didactic tradition of most of Hogarth's series and lacking the teeming detail of the engraver's other works from the same period, these prints are frank, comic portrayals of contrasting sexual moods. |
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BEFORE This scene contrasts a girl's last-minute resistance with her prior inclinations and preparations. With a look of alarm on her face, the girl seems to flee the embraces of her disheveled lover. Grinning wildly, his eyes bulging, he loses his wig in his passion, exposing his shaved head. The girl has, of course, invited him into her bedroom and even anticipated his response by removing beforehand her shackling underwear and displaying it advertisingly upon her chair. The source of her "fall" is to be found in the books on her tumbling vanity. She has been reading the witty, venerial "Poims" of "Rochester" along with some "Novels." "The Practice of Piety" lies vainly bu ostentatiously open in her vanity drawer; it rests beside a love letter. A picture of a putto lighting a phallic rocket suggests the various roles and conditions in the scene. The girl's dog attempts to aid in her defense. An unromantic chamber pot rests beside her foot. AFTER In this scene the pursuit and flight of Before have become passive moods and reactions. The expression on the gentleman's face is changed from one of sexual frenzy to one of wonder and release. He dresses to leave. The girl's anxiety is changed to clinging affection. In a reversal of roles, she now attempts to detain him. On the floor a book is open to a page reading, "Omne Animal Post Coitum Triste/ Aristotle" (Every animal is sad after intercourse). The passage of time is marked by the sun's illumination of "After," a picture of a putto smiling at his exhausted rocket's downward course. Symbolic breakages fill the room; the mirror, the chamber pot, the curtain rail. The sleeping dog reflects his mistress' mood. [Excerpt from Engravings by Hogarth, edited by Sean Shesgreen (Dover, 1973).]
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