To return to Marriage A-la-Mode.  Notwithstanding that the pictures were, as stated at the beginning of this chapter, announced for sale in 1745, it was five years before they actually found a purchaser, although, in the interval, they seem to have been freely exhibited both at the “Golden Head” and at Cock’s Auction Rooms.  In 1750, however, they were at last disposed of by another of those unfortunate schemes devised by Hogarth for disposing of his works.  The bidding, said the announcement in the Daily Advertiser, was to be by written notes; no dealers in pictures were to be admitted as bidders; and the highest bidder at noon on the 6th June was to be the purchaser.

Whether this mode of sale, coupled with the characteristic manner of its notification, “disobliged the Town” or not, it is impossible to say; but it is certain that when Mr. Lane, “of Hillingdon, near Uxbridge,” who was to become the lucky proprietor of the pictures, arrived on the date appointed at the “Golden Head,” he found he was the only bidder who had put in an appearance.[25] In fact, there was no one in the room but the painter himself and his friend Dr. Parsons, Secretary to the Royal Society.  The highest written offer having been declared to be L120, Mr. Lane, shortly before twelve, said he would “make the pounds guineas,” but subsequently much to his credit, offered the artist a delay of some hours to find a better purchaser.  An hour passed, and as, up to that time, no one had appeared, Hogarth, much mortified, surrendered the pictures to Mr. Lane, who thus became the owner of the artist’s best work, and the finest pictorial satire of the century, for the modest sum of L126, which included Carlo Marratti frames that had cost Hogarth four guineas a-piece.  Mr. Lane, who readily promised not to sell or clean the pictures without the knowledge of the painter, left them at his death to his nephew, Colonel J.F.  Cawthorne, by whom they were put up to auction in March, 1792, but were bought in again for 910 guineas.  In 1797 they were sold at Christie’s for L1,381 to Mr. John Julius Angerstein, with the rest of whose collection they were acquired in 1824 for the National Gallery.

    William Hogarth (New York and London, 1891).

FOOTNOTES: 

[23] “It was reserved to Hogarth to write a scene of furniture.  The rake’s levee-room, the nobleman’s dining-room, the apartments of the husband and wife in Marriage A-la-Mode, the alderman’s parlour, the poet’s bed-chamber, and many others, are the history of the manners of the age.”  So says Horace Walpole (Anecdotes, etc., 1771, p. 74), and in this, at least, he was an unimpeachable authority.

[24] The name is added in the print.