William Hogarth

• 1. Introduction

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  William Hogarth told people his pictures were meant to be read, not just looked at. A country girl arrives in London and meets a procuratress. Six scenes later she is dead from venereal disease, and a funeral closes the sequence. This was A Harlot's Progress, and the writer Charles Lamb said of Hogarth's images that other pictures we look at, but his pictures we read, filled with the teeming, fruitful, suggestive meaning of words. He was an English painter, engraver, satirist, cartoonist and writer, born in 1697 and dead by 1764. He called what he did painting and engraving modern moral subjects, treating his subjects as a dramatic writer would, with the picture as his stage. How did a man who never finished his apprenticeship become the most significant English artist of his generation? Why did his work grow so familiar that satirical political illustration is still called Hogarthian? And what did he teach his viewers to fear about gin, marriage, and cruelty to a dog named in graffiti on a wall?

• 2. A Father In The Fleet

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  Richard Hogarth was a poor Latin school teacher and textbook writer who opened a Latin-speaking coffee house at St John's Gate. The venture failed. He was imprisoned for debt in the Fleet Prison for five years, and his son William never once spoke of it. That silence sits oddly beside a career built on exposing failure and ruin in others. William was born at Bartholomew Close in the City of London to Richard and Anne Gibbons, into a lower-middle-class family. The hard edge that runs through his paintings and prints is thought to have come from those years of his father's mixed fortune. He grew up taking a lively interest in the street life of the metropolis and the London fairs, amusing himself by sketching the characters he saw. His formal training never reached its end. Apprenticed to the engraver Ellis Gamble in Leicester Fields, he learned to engrave trade cards and similar small products, but did not complete the apprenticeship. The instinct to read a crowd, formed at the fairs, would later let him fill a single plate with dozens of legible human stories.

• 3. Schools And A Lawsuit

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  In 1720, Hogarth enrolled at the original St Martin's Lane Academy in Peter Court, run by Louis Chéron and John Vanderbank. He studied alongside Joseph Highmore, William Kent, and Arthur Pond. The academy collapsed around 1724, just as Vanderbank fled to France to escape his creditors. Hogarth recalled that the treasurer sank the subscription money, the lamp and stove were seized for rent, and the whole affair was put a stop to. Shortly after a new drawing school opened in Covent Garden in November 1724, Hogarth enrolled there too. It was run by Sir James Thornhill, serjeant painter to George I, whose grand decorative schemes for the dome of St Paul's Cathedral and the Painted Hall at Greenwich Hospital were, Hogarth said, in my head even as an apprentice. He joined the Rose and Crown Club alongside Peter Tillemans, George Vertue, and Michael Dahl. In 1727, the tapestry worker Joshua Morris hired him to design the Element of Earth, then refused the finished work on hearing he was an engraver and no painter. Hogarth sued in the Westminster Court and won his money on the 28th of May 1728. The accusation that he could not paint would shadow his ambitions for decades.

• 4. The Stage And The Crowd

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  An Emblematical Print on the South Sea Scheme, made around 1721 and published in 1724, shows a huge merry-go-round machine that people are boarding, with a goat at the top and the words Whol Ride below. Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Jewish figures gamble in one corner while the well-dressed crowd presses foolishly toward the ride. It was Hogarth's verdict on the stock market crash of 1720, the South Sea Bubble, in which many English people lost a great deal of money. Masquerades and Operas, also from 1724, mocked the masquerades of the Swiss impresario John James Heidegger, the Italian opera singers, John Rich's pantomimes at Lincoln's Inn Fields, and the inflated fame of Lord Burlington's protege, the architect William Kent. In 1726 he prepared twelve large engravings for Samuel Butler's Hudibras, which he valued highly among his early works. Between 1728 and 1732 Hogarth turned to conversation pieces, small oil groups of full-length portraits from twelve to fifteen inches high. He painted The Fountaine Family, the actors of John Gay's The Beggar's Opera, and an amateur performance by children of John Dryden's The Indian Emperour at the home of John Conduitt, master of the mint. He even sketched the condemned Sarah Malcolm two days before her execution.

• 5. Reading The Moral Sequence

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  A Rake's Progress followed A Harlot's Progress in 1733 to 1735, eight pictures tracing Tom Rakewell, son of a rich merchant, who spends everything on luxury, prostitutes, and gambling before ending in Bethlem Royal Hospital. The original paintings of A Harlot's Progress were destroyed in the fire at Fonthill House in 1755, while the oil paintings of A Rake's Progress survive in the gallery room at Sir John Soane's Museum. Success brought theft. Unscrupulous printsellers flooded the market with pirated reproductions, so Hogarth lobbied parliament for legal control over the copying of artists' work. The Engravers' Copyright Act, known as Hogarth's Act, became law on the 25th of June 1735. It was the first copyright law to cover visual works and the first to recognise the authorial rights of an individual artist. Marriage A-la-Mode, painted from 1743 to 1745, gave him six pictures skewering the upper class, with a French-engraved version appearing in 1745. Viscount Squanderfield, son of the bankrupt Earl Squander, marries the daughter of a miserly city merchant. The son is murdered by his wife's lover, Counsellor Silvertongue, who is hanged at Tyburn, after which the daughter takes her own life. William Makepeace Thackeray called it the most important and highly wrought of the Hogarth comedies, and drew the moral plainly: do not marry a man for his rank, or a woman for her money.

• 6. Warnings For The Streets

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  The twelve prints of Industry and Idleness, made in 1747, set two apprentices side by side. The diligent one rises to Sheriff, Alderman, and finally Lord Mayor of London, while the idle one, who begins at play in the church yard, turns highwayman, holes up in a garret with a common prostitute, and is executed at Tyburn. The industrious apprentice is the very man who sends the idle one to the gallows, and each plate carries a passage from scripture, often from the Book of Proverbs. Beer Street and Gin Lane, both from 1751, contrasted a happy city drinking good English beer with the wreckage of gin. The Gin Craze had grown after the Prohibition of 1678 barred French brandy and the London Guild of Distillers was forcibly disbanded in 1690. The woman at the front of Gin Lane lets her baby fall to its death, echoing Judith Dufour, who strangled her own child to sell its clothes for gin money. The prints supported the Gin Act 1751, and Hogarth's friend, the magistrate Henry Fielding, may have enlisted him for the propaganda. The Four Stages of Cruelty, published on the 21st of February 1751, follows Tom Nero, whose name a boy scrawls beneath a hanged stick figure in the first plate. Nero tortures a dog, grows into a horse-beating coach driver, commits murder, and ends as a dissected corpse with the noose still around his neck. That public dissection reflected the Murder Act 1751, which permitted the dissection of criminals hanged for murder.

• 7. The Reach For History

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  In 1745 Hogarth painted the actor David Garrick as Richard III and was paid £200, more, he wrote, than any English artist ever received for a single portrait. With it he established theatrical portraiture as a distinctly British kind of history painting. His full-length portrait of the philanthropic Captain Coram, made in 1740 for the Thomas Coram Foundation for Children, and his unfinished oil sketch The Shrimp Girl rank among the masterpieces of British painting. His engraved portrait of John Wilkes became a bestseller. The grand historical style refused to reward him. Joshua Reynolds, later founder of the Royal Academy of Arts, attacked him in three essays for The Idler written between September and November 1759, rejecting Hogarth's idea that objects are represented naturally when they seem real. In his Discourse XIV, Reynolds allowed that Hogarth had extraordinary talents yet reproached him for presumptuously attempting the great historical style. Horace Walpole was also critical of him as a history painter, but valued his satirical prints. Hogarth kept making history pictures anyway, including The Pool of Bethesda and The Good Samaritan for St Bartholomew's Hospital, and Paul before Felix at Lincoln's Inn. The Gate of Calais of 1748, in Tate Britain, shows a vast sirloin of beef arriving for an English inn while emaciated Frenchmen cringe. Walpole noted that Hogarth ran a great risk to travel there after the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle.

• 8. The Man And His End

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  On the 23rd of March 1729, Hogarth eloped with Jane Thornhill at Paddington Church, against the wishes of her father, Sir James, who thought the obscure artist beneath his daughter. When Jane and her mother conspired to place the early Harlot's Progress paintings in Sir James's rooms, he asked the artist's name and said the man who could produce such representations could maintain a wife without a portion. He soon relented and lived in harmony with the couple until his death. Hogarth set out his theory of beauty in The Analysis of Beauty in 1753, finding grace in the serpentine Line of Beauty, a real child of Rococo. He was a Deist, believing in a God who created the universe but takes no hand in his creations, and so mocked the beaten subjects of religious art. Ronald Paulson notes that nearly every plate of A Harlot's Progress is based on Dürer's images of the Virgin and the Passion, while other works parody Leonardo's Last Supper. Initiated as a Freemason before 1728, Hogarth designed the Hogarth Jewel still owned by the Grand Stewards' Lodge. In 1749 he bought a country retreat in Chiswick, the house now preserved as Hogarth's House. He and Jane had no children but fostered foundlings, and he was a founding Governor of the Foundling Hospital. On the 25th of October 1764 he was carried weak from Chiswick to Leicester Fields, still retouching The Bench, and the next day he replied to a letter from Benjamin Franklin. He boasted of eating a pound of beefsteaks, then began vomiting so violently that the bell he rang broke, and he died about two hours later in the arms of his servant Mary Lewis. His friend David Garrick composed the inscription for his tomb at St Nicholas Church, Chiswick.