Template:POTD/2020-08-22
The Bagnio is the fifth of a series of six oil-on-canvas paintings by English painter and pictorial satirist William Hogarth, created around 1743. The series, entitled Marriage A-la-Mode, depicts an arranged marriage and its disastrous consequences in a satire of 18th-century society, and is now in the collection of the National Gallery in London.
In this picture, the young earl has caught his wife with her lover, the lawyer Silvertongue, and has been fatally wounded by him. The setting is the Turk's Head Bagnio in Covent Garden, originally a coffee house which offered Turkish baths (a bagnio), but by Hogarth's time it had become a place where rooms could be taken for the night with no questions asked. As the murderer makes his escape in his nightshirt through the window, the countess begs forgiveness from her dying husband. Meanwhile, the noise of the fight has awakened the master of the house, who appears through the door on the right with the watch.Painting credit: William Hogarth