This renowned art painting is discussed by David Nolta, PhD, Massachusetts College of Art and Design. He comments:
The second in a series of six pictures representing the corruption and decline of a
fashionable marriage (Marriage à la Môde), Hogarth's Tête à Tête takes place in the chic but messy drawing room of a newly married couple who seem only accidentally to have met there. With the combined instincts of a satirical novelist and a stage impresario, Hogarth packs the scene with symbolic and often suggestive details. 
The profligate young earl slouches in his chair, dazed and disconsolate, a broken sword at his feet and a beauty patch on his neck alluding to impotence and venereal disease. His unaristocratic heiress wife stretches her
limbs and looks slyly toward her spouse, while the bills go off unpaid, the furniture tips, and a little dog sniffs the linen of another woman.
Oil on canvas, ca. 1743. 28" x 36". National Gallery, London.
Ruin is the prophecy here, and Hogarth shows the fulfillment of that prophecy in four subsequent episodes, each one painted in the same paradoxically light and charming style which is the artist's unique reworking of the Rococo.