A Fashionable Marriage / Marriage à la Mode / The Countess's Morning Levée; The Countess / 1743 / The Grocer's Daughter / Mrs M Thatcher / 1986
- Object:
Drawing
- Place of origin:
London, England (made)
- Date:
1986 (made)
- Artist/Maker:
Lubaina Himid (artist)
- Materials and Techniques:
Wash drawing with collage
- Museum number:
E.599-1996
- Gallery location:
Prints & Drawings Study Room, level F, case WD, shelf 227
In 1986 British artist Lubaina Himid was drawn to an image in a popular print series by William Hogarth. Marriage a la Mode of 1743 sought to expose the greed, fashionable excesses and exploitation which Hogarth saw at the heart of affluent 18th-century London life. Through six scenes, it describes the fall-out from an arranged marriage between the son of an impoverished Earl and the daughter of an avaricious tobacco merchant. Himid focused on scene four in which the countess is pictured at her toilette receiving the attention of her lover, the lawyer Silvertongue, surrounded by friends and admirers.
Himid’s response took the form of an installation entitled A Fashionable Marriage. Using larger-than-life plywood figures, she reused the characters and composition of the Hogarth original to deliver a scathing critique on contemporary art and politics. The countess and her lover became British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and US President Ronald Reagan, ‘an unwholesome liaison of capitalism and imperialism’ (Bernadette Fort, 2001). In this preparatory drawing Thatcher’s dress is sprinkled with bananas, a reference to her many ‘slips’ which are described beside each bunch: ‘Belgrano’, ‘miners’ strike’, ‘inner city neglect’, ‘unemployment’.
