William Hogarth (10 November, 1697 – 26 October, 1764) was a major
English
painter, printmaker, pictorial satirist, social
critic and editorial cartoonist who
has been credited with pioneering western sequential art. His work ranged from
realistic portraiture to
comic strip-like series of pictures
called "modern moral subjects". Much of his work poked fun at
contemporary politics and customs; illustrations in such style are
often referred to as "Hogarthian".
Early life
William and Jane Hogarth's tomb
William
Hogarth was born at Bartholomew Close in London
to Richard
Hogarth, a poor Latin school teacher and
textbook writer, and Anne Gibbons. In his youth he was
apprenticed to the engraver
Ellis
Gamble in
Leicester Fields,
where he learned to engrave
trade cards
and similar products. Young Hogarth also took a lively interest in
the street life of the metropolis and the London fairs, and amused
himself by sketching the characters he saw.
Around the same time,
his father, who had opened an unsuccessful Latin-speaking coffee house at St John's Gate
, was imprisoned for
debt in Fleet
Prison
for five years. Hogarth never spoke of his
father's imprisonment.
He became a member of the
Rose and
Crown Club, with
Peter
Tillemans,
George Vertue,
Michael Dahl, and other artists and
connoisseurs.
Career
By April 1720 Hogarth was an
engraver in
his own right, at first engraving coats of arms, shop bills, and
designing plates for booksellers.
In 1727, he was hired by Joshua Morris, a tapestry worker, to
prepare a design for the
Element of Earth. Morris,
however, heard that he was "an engraver, and no painter", and
consequently declined the work when completed. Hogarth accordingly
sued him for the money in the
Westminster Court, where the case was
decided in his favour on 28 May 1728. In 1757 he was appointed
Serjeant Painter to the King.
Early works
Early satirical works included an
Emblematical Print on
the South Sea Scheme (c.1721), about the disastrous stock
market crash of 1720 known as the
South
Sea Bubble, in which many English people lost a great deal of
money. In the bottom left corner, he shows
Protestant,
Catholic, and
Jewish figures gambling, while in the middle
there is a huge machine, like a merry-go-round, which people are
boarding. At the top is a goat, written below which is "Who'l Ride"
and this shows the stupidity of people in following the crowd in
buying stock in
The South Sea
Company, which spent more time issuing stock than anything
else. The people are scattered around the picture with a real sense
of disorder, which represented the confusion. The progress of the
well dressed people towards the ride in the middle shows how
foolish some people could be, which is not entirely their own
fault.
Other early works include
The Lottery (1724);
The
Mystery of Masonry brought to Light by the Gormogons (1724);
A Just View of the
British Stage (1724); some book illustrations; and the
small print,
Masquerades and Operas (1724).
The latter is a satire
on contemporary follies, such as the masquerades of the Swiss impresario John James Heidegger, the popular
Italian opera singers, John Rich's pantomimes at Lincoln's Inn
Fields
, and the exaggerated popularity of Lord Burlington's
protégé, the architect and painter William
Kent. He continued that theme in 1727, with the
Large Masquerade Ticket. In 1726 Hogarth prepared twelve
large engravings for
Samuel
Butler's
Hudibras. These he
himself valued highly, and are among his best book
illustrations.
In the following years he turned his attention to the production of
small "
conversation
piece" (i.e., groups in oil of full-length portraits from 12 to
15 in. high). Among his efforts in oil between 1728 and 1732 were
The Fountaine Family (c.1730),
The Assembly at
Wanstead House,
The House of Commons examining
Bambridge, and several pictures of the chief actors in
John Gay's popular
The Beggar's Opera.
One of his
masterpieces of this period is the depiction of an amateur
performance of John Dryden's The
Indian Emperor, or The Conquest of Mexico (1732–1735) at the
home of John Conduitt, master of the
mint, in St George's Street,
Hanover
Square
.
Hogarth's other works in the 1730s include
A Midnight Modern
Conversation (1733),
Southwark Fair (1733),
The
Sleeping Congregation (1736),
Before and
After (1736),
Scholars at a Lecture (1736),
The Company of Undertakers (Consultation of Quacks)
(1736),
The Distrest Poet
(1736),
The Four Times of
the Day (1738), and
Strolling Actresses
Dressing in a Barn (1738). He may also have printed
Burlington Gate (1731), evoked by
Alexander Pope's Epistle to
Lord Burlington, and
defending Lord Chandos, who is therein satirized. This print gave
great offence, and was suppressed (some modern authorities,
however, no longer attribute this to Hogarth).
Moralizing art
Harlot's and Rake's Progresses
In 1731, he completed the earliest of the series of moral works
which first gave him recognition as a great and original genius.
This was
A Harlot's
Progress, first as paintings, (now lost), and then
published as engravings. In its six scenes, the miserable fate of a
country girl who began a prostitution career in town is traced out
remorselessly from its starting point, the meeting of a bawd, to
its shameful and degraded end, the whore's death of venereal
disease and the following merciless funeral ceremony.
The series was an
immediate success, and was followed in 1735 by the sequel
A Rake's Progress showing
in eight pictures the reckless life of Tom Rakewell, the son of a
rich merchant, who wastes all his money on luxurious living,
whoring, and gambling, and ultimately finishes his life in Bedlam
. The original paintings of A Harlot's
Progress were destroyed in the fire at Fonthill Abbey
in 1755; A Rake's Progress is displayed in
the gallery room at Sir John Soane's Museum
, London.
Marriage à-la-mode
In
1743–1745 Hogarth painted the six pictures of Marriage à-la-mode (National
Gallery, London
), a pointed skewering of upper class 18th century
society. This moralistic warning shows the miserable tragedy
of an ill-considered marriage for money. This is regarded by many
as his finest project, certainly the best piece of his
serially-planned story cycles.
Marital ethics were the topic of much debate in 18th century
Britain. Frequent marriages of convenience and their attendant
unhappiness came in for particular criticism, with a variety of
authors taking the view that love was a much sounder basis for
marriage. Hogarth here painted a satire – a genre that by
definition has a moral point to convey – of a conventional marriage
within the English upper class. All the paintings were engraved and
the series achieved wide circulation in print form.
The series, which are
set in a Classical interior, shows the story of the fashionable
marriage of the son of bankrupt Earl Squanderfield to the daughter
of a wealthy but miserly city merchant,
starting with the signing of a marriage contract at the Earl's
mansion and ending with the murder of the son
by his wife's lover and the suicide of the
daughter after her lover is hanged at Tyburn
for
murdering her husband.
Industry and Idleness
In the twelve prints of
Industry and Idleness (1747)
Hogarth shows the progression in the lives of two apprentices, one
who is dedicated and hard working, the other
idle which leads to
crime and his
execution.
This shows the work ethic of Protestant England, where those
who work hard get rewarded, such as the industrious apprentice who
becomes Sheriff (plate 8),
Alderman (plate 10), and finally the
Lord Mayor of
London in the last plate in the series.
The idle
apprentice, who begins with being "at play in the church yard" (plate 3), holes up "in a
Garrett with a Common Prostitute" after turning highwayman (plate 7) and "executed at Tyburn" (plate
11). The idle apprentice is sent to the
gallows by the industrious apprentice himself.
Beer Street and Gin Lane
Later important prints include his pictorial warning of the
unpleasant consequences of
alcoholism in
Beer Street and
Gin Lane (1751) Hogarth engraved
Beer Street
to show a happy city drinking the 'good' beverage of English
beer, versus
Gin Lane which showed the
effects of drinking
gin which, as a harder
liquor, caused more problems for society. People are shown as
healthy, happy and prosperous in
Beer Street, while in
Gin Lane they are scrawny, lazy and careless. The woman at
the front of
Gin Lane who lets her baby fall to its death,
echoes the tale of Judith Dufour who strangled her baby so she
could sell its clothes for gin money. The prints were published in
support of what would become the
Gin Act
1751.
Hogarth's friend, the magistrate
Henry
Fielding, may have enlisted Hogarth to help with propaganda for
a Gin Act:
Beer Street and
Gin Lane were issued
shortly after his work
An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late
Increase of Robbers, and Related Writings and addressed the
same issues.
The Four Stages of Cruelty
Other prints were his outcry against inhumanity in
The Four Stages of Cruelty
(1751); a series which Hogarth intended to show some of the
terrible habits of criminals. In the first picture there are scenes
of torture of dogs, cats and other animals. In the second it shows
one of the characters from the first painting, Tom Nero, has now
become a coach driver, and his cruelty to his horse caused it to
break its leg. In the third painting Tom is shown as a murderer,
with the woman he killed lying on the ground, while in the fourth,
titled Reward of Cruelty, the murderer is shown being dissected by
scientists after his execution. Hogarth is thus using the series to
say what will happen to people who carry on in this manner. This
shows what crimes people were concerned with in this time, the
method of execution, and the dissection reflects upon the 1752
Act of Parliament which had just
being passed allowing for the dissection of executed criminals who
had been convicted for murder. It shows his reaction against the
cruel treatment of animals which he saw around him, that he wished
could be stopped.
Portraits
Hogarth's portrait of "The Shrimp
Girl" 1740-1745
Hogarth was also a popular
portrait
painter. In 1746 he painted actor
David Garrick as
Richard III, for which he was paid £200,
“which was more,” he wrote, “than any English artist ever received
for a single portrait.” In the same year a sketch of
Simon Fraser, 11th Lord Lovat,
afterwards beheaded on Tower Hill, had an exceptional success.
Hogarth's
truthful, vivid full-length portrait of his friend, the
philanthropic Captain Coram (1740; formerly Thomas Coram Foundation for
Children, now Foundling Museum
), and his unfinished oil sketch of The Shrimp Girl (National
Gallery, London) may be called masterpieces of British painting.
Historical subjects
During a long period of his life, Hogarth tried to achieve the
status of
history painter, but had
no great success in this field.
Biblical scenes
Examples
of his history pictures are The Pool of Bethesda and
The Good Samaritan, executed in 1736–1737 for St
Bartholomew's Hospital
; Moses brought before Pharaoh's Daughter,
painted for the Foundling
Hospital (1747, formerly at the Thomas Coram Foundation for
Children, now in the Foundling Museum); Paul before Felix (1748) at Lincoln's Inn
; and his altarpiece for St. Mary
Redcliffe
, Bristol
(1756).
The Gate of Calais
The Gate
of Calais (1748; now in Tate Britain
) was produced soon after his return from a visit to
France. Horace Walpole
wrote that Hogarth had run a great risk to go there since the
peace of
Aix-la-Chapelle,
he went to France, and was so imprudent as
to be taking a sketch of the drawbridge at Calais
.
He was seized and carried to the governor, where he was
forced to prove his vocation by producing several caricatures of the French; particularly a scene
of the shore, with an immense piece of beef landing for the lion
d'argent, the English inn at Calais, and several hungry friars
following it.
They were much diverted with his drawings, and
dismissed him.
Back home, he immediately executed a painting of the subject in
which he unkindly represented his enemies, the
Frenchmen, as cringing, emaciated and
superstitious people, while an enormous sirloin of beef arrives,
destined for the English inn as a symbol of British prosperity and
superiority. He claimed to have painted himself into the picture in
the left corner sketching the gate, with a "soldier's hand upon my
shoulder", running him in.
Other later works
Notable Hogarth engravings in the 1740s include
The Enraged Musician (1741), the
six prints of
Marriage à-la-mode (1745; executed by French
artists under Hogarth's inspection), and
The Stage Coach or The
Country Inn Yard (1747).
In 1745
Hogarth painted a self-portrait with his pug dog (now also in
Tate
Britain), which shows him as a learned artist supported by
volumes of Shakespeare, Milton and Swift. In 1749, he represented the somewhat
disorderly English troops on their March of the Guards to
Finchley (formerly located in Thomas Coram Foundation for
Children, now Foundling Museum).
Others
were his ingenious Satire on False Perspective
(1753); his satire on canvassing in his Election series (1755–1758; now
in Sir John
Soane's Museum); his ridicule of the English passion for cockfighting in The Cockpit (1759); his
attack on Methodism in Credulity,
Superstition, and Fanaticism (1762); his political anti-war
satire in The Times, plate I (1762); and his pessimistic
view of all things in Tailpiece, or The Bathos
(1764).
Writing
Hogarth also wrote and published his ideas of artistic design in
his book
The Analysis of
Beauty (1753). In it, he professes to define the
principles of beauty and grace which he, a real child of
Rococo, saw realized in serpentine lines (the
Line of Beauty).
Analysis
Painter and engraver of modern moral subjects
Hogarth lived in an age when artwork became increasingly
commercialized and viewed in shop windows,
taverns and public buildings and sold in
printshop. Old hierarchies broke down, and
new forms began to flourish: the
ballad
opera, the
bourgeois tragedy,
and especially, a new form of
fiction called
the
novel with which authors such as
Henry Fielding had great success. Therefore,
by that time, Hogarth hit on a new idea: "painting and engraving
modern moral subjects ... to treat my subjects as a dramatic
writer; my picture was my stage", as he himself remarked in his
manuscript notes.
He drew from the highly moralizing
Protestant tradition of Dutch
genre painting, and the very vigorous
satirical traditions of the English
broadsheet and other types of popular print. In
England the fine arts had little comedy in them before Hogarth. His
prints were expensive, and remained so until early
nineteenth-century reprints brought them to a wider audience.
Parodic borrowings from the Old Masters
When analysing the work of the artist as a whole,
Ronald Paulson says, "In
A Harlot's Progress, every single
plate but one is based on
Dürer's images of the story of the
Virgin and the story of
the
Passion." In other works,
he parodies
Leonardo da Vinci's
Last Supper. According to
Paulson, Hogarth is subverting the religious establishment and the
orthodox belief in an immanent
God who
intervenes in the lives of people and produces
miracles. Indeed, Hogarth was a
Deist, a believer in a God who created the universe
but takes no direct hand in the lives of his creations. Thus, as a
"comic history painter", he often poked fun at the old-fashioned,
"beaten" subjects of religious art in his paintings and prints.
Hogarth also rejected
Lord
Shaftesbury's then current ideal of the
classical Greek male in
favour of the living, breathing female. He said, "Who but a bigot,
even to the
antiques, will say that he has
not seen faces and necks, hands and arms in living women, that even
the Grecian
Venus doth but coarsely
imitate."
Personal life
On 23 March 1729 Hogarth married Jane Thornhill, daughter of artist
Sir
James Thornhill.
Hogarth was initiated as a
Freemason some
time before 1728 in the Lodge at the Hand and Apple Tree Tavern,
Little Queen Street, and later belonged to the Carrier Stone Lodge
and the Grand Stewards' Lodge; the latter still possesses the
'Hogarth Jewel' which Hogarth designed for the Lodge's Master to
wear. Today the original is in storage and a replica is worn by the
Master of the Lodge. Freemasonry was a theme in some of Hogarth's
work, most notably 'Night', the fourth in the quartet of paintings
(later released as engravings) collectively entitled the
Four Times of the Day.
Hogarth
died in London on 26 October 1764 and was buried at St. Nicholas's
Churchyard, Chiswick Mall, Chiswick
, London. His friend, actor
David Garrick, composed the following
inscription for his tombstone:
- Farewell great Painter of Mankind
- Who reach'd the noblest point of Art
- Whose pictur'd Morals charm the Mind
- And through the Eye correct the Heart.
- If Genius fire thee, Reader, stay,
- If Nature touch thee, drop a Tear:
- If neither move thee, turn away,
- For Hogarth's honour'd dust lies here.
Influence and Reputation
Hogarth's work were a direct influence on John Collier, who was known as
the "Lancashire Hogarth".
Hogarth's paintings and prints have provided the subject matter for
several other works. For example, Igor
Stravinsky's opera The Rake's Progress, with libretto
by W. H.
Auden, was inspired by Hogarth's series
of paintings of that title. Russell
Banks' short story, "Indisposed," is a fictional account of
Hogarth's infidelity as told from the viewpoint of his wife, Jane.
Hogarth's engravings also inspired the BBC
radio play "The Midnight House" by Jonathan Hall, based on the
M.R. James
ghost story "The Mezzotint" and first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2006.
Hogarth's
House
in Chiswick, West London, is now a
museum; it abuts one of London's best known road junctions – the Hogarth
Roundabout
.
Gallery
Notes
Bibliography
- Fort, Bernadette, and
Angela Rosenthal, The Other
Hogarth: Aesthetics of Difference. Princeton: Princeton UP,
2003.
- Peter Quennell, Hogarth's
Progress (London, New York 1955)
- Frederick Antal, Hogarth
and His Place in European Art (London 1962)
- David Bindman, Hogarth
(London 1981)
- Ronald Paulson, Hogarth's
Graphic Works (3rd edn, London 1989)
- Ronald Paulson, Hogarth, 3 vols. (New Brunswick
1991-93)
- Jenny Uglow, Hogarth: A Life
and a World (London 1997)
- Frédéric Ogée
and Peter Wagner, eds., William
Hogarth: Theater and the Theater of Life (Los Angeles,
1997)
- Sean Shesgreen, Hogarth 101 Prints. New York: Dover,
1973.
- Sean Shesgreen, Hogarth and the Times-of-the-Day
Tradition. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1983
- Hans-Peter Wagner,
William Hogarth: Das graphische Werk (Saarbrücken,
1998)
- David Bindman, Frédéric Ogée and Peter Wagner, eds. Hogarth: Representing
Nature's Machines (Manchester, 2001)
- Christine Riding and
Mark Hallet, "Hogarth" (Tate Publishing, London, 2006)
- Robin Simon, Hogarth, France and British Art: The rise
of the arts in eighteenth-century Britain (London,
2007)
See also
External links
, 8 October 2007 (available for download as MP3, MP4
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