During his lifetime, William Hogarth painted a number of satirical portraits in which he attacked folly and vice, including extravagance, drunkenness, and gambling. Hogarth was a theater enthusiast and thought of his paintings in dramatic as opposed to pictorial terms. "The Lady’s Last Stake" was inspired by a comedy of the same name by British playwright Colley Cibber (1671–1757), in which a married aristocratic woman gambles away her fortune to an army officer. The soldier then proposes…