William Hogarth's Fashionable Orgy

The Rake’s Progress isn’t just a naughty picture of drunken depravity. It’s also an inspired guide to 1730s clothes, says Philippa Stockley

- Philippa Stockley

How do you dress like an 18th-century rake? You could do worse than emulate the star of A Rake’s Progress, about to star in a groundbreaking exhibition of all William Hogarth’s series of ‘modern moral’ paintings at Sir John Soane’s Museum.

A Rake’s Progress was his second morality tale painted in series form, before being engraved for sale. Hogarth (1697-1764) began as an engraver and then learned to paint by working for Baroque muralist James Thornhill, whose daughter he married. His painting improved rapidly while his engraving was always superb. When he completed A Rake’s Progress in 1734, he was at the top of his game in terms of technique, composition and storytelling. He had invented the 18th-century box set.

Hogarth gleefully crammed plot into each funny, didactic and salutary painting, using various forms of visual shorthand including wry textual pointers such as bills and tracts and apposite paintings on walls. But he relied even more on clothing, demeanour and pose. We have long interpreted wealth, status and attitude through clothes – take medieval sumptuary laws – and exploited them for comedic or moralistic purpose. But razor-witted Hogarth painted clothing with such vim that he must have sniggered at every brushstroke.

Set in London, A Rake’s Progress tells the tale of Tom Rakewell’s rise and fall over eight paintings. We first see him as a gormless youth in a baggy cloth suit, shoes with paltry buckles and his own curly brown hair (which no gentleman would be seen dead in, rather than a wig), being measured for a new suit while dumping his poor but faithful girlfriend.