Night, plate 4, from the series The Four Times of Day

Hogarth painted The Four Times of Day about 1736 as decoration for Vauxhall Gardens, a fashionable pleasure garden along the Thames which catered to the aristocracy. Satirizing popular middle- and lower-class entertainments in London, the scenes also allude to traditional cycles of the four times of day, the four seasons, the four ages of man, and (possibly) the four stages of matrimony.

An autumn night: a coach capsizes as horses shy away from the bonfire in the road. With Hogarth's typical comic inversion, instead of going to sleep, nearly everyone in the scene prepares for nighttime activity. In the foreground a drunken Freemason is escorted home, possibly implying married men's escape from domesticity in private clubs and drinking bouts.