William Hogarth, Strolling Actresses Dressing in a Barn

So much of Hogarth's work combines exquisite detail with subtle meanings that works on many different levels, and this engraving is an ideal example. The original painting was unfortunately lost to a fire in 1874. 

A traveling theater company has made use of an old barn as a dressing room, leading to this surreal scene. The actors play Roman gods and goddesses, contrasting the worlds of the divine and the mortal, the lofty and the mundane. 

The playbill, in the lower left, identifies the production as The Devil to Pay in Heaven, and Hogarth may be poking fun at the church-sponsored morality plays so common at the time. A contemporary viewer would also have been aware that Parliament had recently passed a new law, which heavily censored dramatic productions and outlawed unlicensed troupes. This will be their bittersweet final performance. 

In the center, Diana practices her pose, though she hardly looks like a chaste goddess. To the right, two children dressed as devils drink from a mug of beer, as if taking an offering from an altar, while to the left Flora, the goddess of the spring, dusts her hair in front of a broken mirror. 

A woman grasps a cat as an actress playing a ghost draws blood from its tail, which was apparently a folk remedy for an injury from a fall. Below them, Juno memorizes her lines, Night darns her stocking, and a monkey urinates into a prop helmet. 

To the top left, Cupid recover a pair of stockings for Apollo, and below, a Siren gives Ganymede a drink to help numb his toothache. Aurora is frustrated with fixing Ganymede's dress. An actress dressed as Juno's eagle feeds a child, with the bowl resting on a crown and a copy of the Act against Strolling Players. The playbill is precariously perched over a chamberpot. 

My favorite element of the picture is a caricature of a vanitas painting at the bottom, where two kittens are playing with an orb and a harp. And if you look very closely, a man is peering down through a hole in the roof, referencing the myth of Actaeon seeing Diana naked. 

The little things that happen on Earth are like reflections of the grand drama we imagine is playing itself out in the Heavens, sometimes as a comedy, and sometimes as a tragedy. Do the gods also have to worry about intrusive politicians, or how to feed the baby after losing one's livelihood? 

William Hogarth, Strolling Actresses Dressing in a Barn (1738)