The scene this work relates to opens the whole Marriage à la Mode story: a wealthy merchant hands over his daughter in marriage to the son of a lord, buying the family a title, while the lord, in return, uses the arrangement to settle his own debts and keep up his patronage of the arts^[1]. Hogarth built his narrative series scene by scene, in the manner of a novelist, filling each composition with incidental detail meant to be read and interpreted by the viewer alongside the main action, so that the transactional nature of the match, love and affection having no part in it, is established from the very first image^[2].

Hogarth's method was to paint the subjects of his series in oil first, and then engrave them onto copper himself, drawing on the training as an engraver he had built before he turned fully to painting. He preferred to work from memory rather than draw from a live model, regarding life-drawing as merely another form of copying once he had left his own training behind, and instead fixed the scenes and people he wanted in his memory before composing them^[3]. He explained his shift away from conventional portrait painting in his own words, saying that because portraiture, done conscientiously, was laborious and not sufficiently profitable to support his family, he turned his thoughts to painting and engraving modern subjects, a field he considered not broken up in any country or any age^[3].

Marriage à la Mode belongs to the run of pictures Hogarth called his modern moral subjects, following A Harlot's Progress in 1731 and A Rake's Progress in 1732 to 1733, cycles that made a scathing critique of the moral degradation of refined society^[2]. In this, his work departs from the closest French equivalents, such as Jean-Baptiste Greuze's bourgeois dramas, which dwelt on the moral dilemmas of the middle classes rather than turning a social critique directly on the ruling elite, as Hogarth did throughout this series^[2].