William Hogarth

William Hogarth (1697–1764) occupies a central place in the history of English art. A fervent believer that England should produce a strong native art rather than relying on the talents of expatriate artists such as Sir Peter Lely and Sir Godfrey Kneller, Hogarth looked to the life of the London streets, parlors, bedrooms, and taverns for his subject matter, creating lively morality tales in both paintings and prints.

Hogarth was the son of the ambitious but unlucky classics scholar Richard Hogarth, who arrived in London from the North in the late seventeenth century. At various times, Hogarth senior worked as a schoolteacher, the author of Latin grammar textbooks, and the proprietor of a coffee shop that promoted conversation in Latin. The failure of the coffee shop by 1708 plunged the elder Hogarth into debt, and he served four years in debtors’ prison, a story that would work its way into his son’s art years later.

William Hogarth was one of only three Hogarth children out of nine who survived to adulthood. His mother was a strong woman who supported her family during her husband’s imprisonment by selling home remedies. Hogarth was likely educated by his father and may have also attended school. He noted that his interest in art was sparked by a painter who lived nearby: “An early access to a neighbouring Painter drew my attention from play,” and, thereafter, “every opportunity was employed in attempts at drawing.” [1]

At the age of fifteen, Hogarth was apprenticed to a silver engraver. While he found the work tedious, it evidently improved his skills in drafting and embellishment, for, in 1720, he went into business for himself as an engraver of copper plates, producing trade cards, tickets, and other ephemera. In the same year, he enrolled in St. Martin’s Academy, a new school that provided instruction in drawing from life. Hogarth produced his first fine art print, The South Sea Scheme, satirizing a contemporary political scandal, in 1721. In 1726, he published his first significant series of engravings, illustrations of Samuel Butler’s satirical poem Hudibras.

Hogarth’s artistic debut occurred during a craze in the art market for prints, when support for painting, especially by English artists, was at best lukewarm. The tradition of elaborate church painting was not strong in England, and commissions for portraits were often given to artists from the continent who were living in London. [2] Thus, his choice to publish prints proved fortuitous, and the artist soon achieved a modest reputation. His eventual decision to sell his prints by subscription also brought him a degree of financial reward.

This rise in his fortunes coincided with his entry into an academy founded by the painter James Thornhill, an English artist of some renown who had recently completed a series in grisaille on the life of St. Paul for St. Paul’s Cathedral. In 1729, Hogarth married Thornhill’s daughter Jane, and two years later the couple moved into her parents’ home. The association with a successful artist such as Thornhill helped to cement Hogarth’s reputation as a serious artist. In the late 1720s, Hogarth took up painting, and commissions for portraits began to flow in. He also painted subjects drawn from literature and the theater, such as The Beggar’s Opera, Act III, 1729–1731, collection of the Tate Gallery, London.

In the 1730s, Hogarth produced his two most famous moralizing series. The idea to create a visual narrative in stages stemmed no doubt in part from his experience illustrating Butler’s Hudibras. Hogarth probably had other sources for his narrative model as well, such as visual accounts of the story of the Prodigal Son or the lives of the saints. [3] The first of Hogarth’s moralizing series, A Harlot’s Progress—paintings, now lost, 1731, and engravings 1732—told the story in six stages of Moll Hackabout, an innocent country girl who arrives in London and quickly falls prey to corrupt forces in the city. At first, Moll becomes the mistress of a wealthy man, but she is cast aside when she is unfaithful to her benefactor. She then lapses into prostitution, contracts a venereal disease, and eventually dies surrounded by a group of vulgar and callous “mourners.” In each scene, Hogarth included numerous objects and attributes with hidden meanings, which helped to convey the series’ moral lessons.

A Rake’s Progress—paintings 1733, Soane Museum, London, and engravings 1735—recounted the tale of Tom Rakewell, a young man who comes into a fortune upon the death of his father. Instead of behaving responsibly with his newfound wealth, he squanders it in an attempt to ape the life of a gentleman, with fashionable quarters and expensive lessons in dance, music, and fencing. Further dissolution comes from carousing until the early morning in a raucous tavern. Although he is at first saved from debt by the faithful Sarah Young, a young woman whom he had earlier cast aside, she cannot ultimately redeem him. In a last-ditch effort to evade debtors’ prison, Tom marries an old woman for her money, but soon spends all of his wife’s money gambling. The final stages of the series show Tom in prison for debt and finally in a madhouse, where Sarah Young weeps by his side while he grins maniacally, oblivious to her presence.

Hogarth enjoyed enormous success with both A Harlot’s Progress and A Rake’s Progress, selling the engravings to a public eager to own the dramatic morality tales but perhaps also titillated by the salacious details in the images. By 1733, he had achieved the financial means to move to upscale Leicester Fields in London, where he lived for the rest of his life. He moved in fashionable circles, counting the novelist Henry Fielding and the actor David Garrick as friends and the writer Horace Walpole as a patron and admirer. An ambitious man, Hogarth endeavored to draw the attention of the king, George II, and he completed some paintings of the king’s children.

Aspiring to be a history painter, Hogarth completed large-scale works for St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in 1736 and 1737, but he derived most of his success from satirical paintings and prints. In 1735, with a number of other artists, he advocated the passing of the Engraver’s Copyright Act to prevent pirated copies of his popular engravings. At times, he relied on fine French engravers to produce his engravings; at other times, he engraved them himself or had them printed as cheaply as possible to ensure profitability.

Hogarth skewered the nobility, middle, and working classes equally. His series Marriage à la Mode—paintings circa 1743, National Gallery, London, and engravings 1745—satirized the arranged marriages of the English gentry. In six images, Hogarth depicted the disastrous results of a marriage based on greed and a desire for rank rather than love. Industry and Idleness, 1747, contrasted the rewards of a virtuous life with the punishment meted out to the lazy. In Beer Street and Gin Lane, 1751, the artist drew a distinction between the healthful effects of beer drinking and the ruinous effects of the consumption of gin. Other notable series include The Four Times of the Day, 1738, The Four Stages of Cruelty, 1751, and Election, 1754. Highly detailed, with lively compositions, these prints communicated their messages through easily read narratives and recognizable characters.

The artist also participated in the active life of the artistic community in London. From the 1730s through the 1750s, he helped to run St. Martin’s Lane Academy, providing a much-needed place of instruction for young artists. With other friends, he participated in the decoration of the pleasure grounds at Vauxhall Gardens around 1740. Between 1746 and 1750, he rendered paintings in the Grand Manner drawn from ancient history for the Foundling Hospital. He was also much in demand as a portraitist during this period, executing a number of portraits of British noblemen. His most accomplished likeness, however, may be his Self Portrait with a Pug from 1745. Success in the 1740s allowed him to purchase a country house, Chiswick Hall, in 1749.

In his later years, Hogarth grew increasingly irascible, feuding publicly with other artists and writers and taking umbrage at the slightest disagreement. He perceived even the mild criticism that met the publication of his Analysis of Beauty in 1753 as an attack on his talent. A noted xenophobe, he published engravings satirizing foreign artists and foreigners in general. When recognition finally came, as it did with commissions for history paintings for London’s Lincoln’s Inn and St. Mary Redcliffe church in Bristol, and with his appointment as Sergeant-Painter to the King in 1757, which provided him an income for the rest of his life, it was too late to prevent his increasing bitterness. He spent his final years producing vicious pictorial satires of his perceived enemies. One of his final engravings, The Bathos from 1764, depicted an allegory of the world’s end, with civilization, art, and mankind itself in ruins. The artist died later that year.

Notes:

[1] Ronald Paulson, Hogarth (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991), volume 1, 25.

[2] Jenny Uglow, Hogarth: A Life and A World (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1997), 66.

[3] Frances Rustin, “From the Prodigal Son to the Rake’s Progress: Hogarth’s Forerunners,” Apollo, 148, no. 438 (August 1998), 16.