HOGARTH, WILLIAM (1697–1764)

HOGARTH, WILLIAM (1697–1764), English painter and engraver. Famous for his biting and satirical visual commentaries on urban life, William Hogarth had a particularly profound impact on the development of print culture, especially political cartoons and the modern comic strip.

Born in London to the schoolmaster Richard Hogarth and Anne Gibbons, Hogarth served an apprenticeship in 1713 to a silver-plate engraver before becoming an independent engraver in 1720. By this time he had also taken up painting, attending the academy in St. Martin's Lane. During the 1720s and 1730s, Hogarth emerged as an important portraitist, producing several impressive "conversation pieces"—small-scale informal group portraits of members of a family or friends in social gatherings—and a number of sensitive portraits of individual sitters. Hogarth, however, pursued his goal of history painting, achieving his first major success in 1729 with The Beggar's Opera, the representation of a scene from John Gay's popular satirical ballad opera. In his Biographical Anecdotes, Hogarth later explained that he conceived of his pictures as stages, and men and women his players, "who by means of certain actions and gestures, are to exhibit a dumb shew" (Hogarth, 1955, p. 209). It was, above all, with his so-called modern moral subjects that Hogarth developed his ideals of pictorial drama. In this innovative genre, Hogarth related moralizing tales drawn from contemporary life in a sequence of narrative paintings, which were subsequently engraved and circulated widely. Satirical in tone, these modern moral subjects offered tart critiques of virtually all social groups.

The first of these sequential narratives, A Harlot's Progress (1732), comprised six scenes that followed the misfortunes of a country girl in London. Scene two shows her dominating a Jewish lover, having adopted the flamboyant lifestyle of an aristocratic lady, complete with gossiping servants and a tea-bearing black servant. In subsequent scenes, the woman declines into prostitution and finally dies of syphilis. A similar trajectory can be witnessed in Hogarth's A Rake's Progress (1735), which tracks the fate of its spendthrift protagonist from inheritance to the madhouse. Hogarth's most lavish modern moral subject was, however, Marriage à la Mode (1745). This set of images—Hogarth's only series to take place completely indoors—comments directly on the evils that stem from greed and a continual quest for status. Scene four shows the consequences of a doomed arranged marriage. At a morning reception, the newly wed countess presides over a colorful group of hangerson, including a French hairdresser, who fusses with her hair, and an Italian castrato. Marriage à la Mode also addresses artistic taste by lampooning contemporary fashion for Continental finery, including baroque painting and Palladian architecture.

Hogarth set forth his thoughts on aesthetics systematically in his 1753 treatise The Analysis of Beauty. In this illustrated text, Hogarth drew on everyday life and often comic examples to argue that the judgment of beauty was not the prerogative of the connoisseur, whose pretensions he despised, but rather a set of qualities available to a wider public.

Hogarth's serious works offered fresh perspectives on the persistent social ills—substance abuse, poverty, and moral decay—that plagued life in eighteenth-century London. Operating within the lively paper culture that was transforming the early modern public sphere, Hogarth's successful pictorial dramas both reflected these ills and developed visual critiques of their causes. In so doing, Hogarth produced a socially, morally, and politically engaging art that addressed issues of class, gender, and race in an age of colonial expansion. The artist's skepticism left few unscathed; he ruthlessly poked fun at politicians (as in The Times, The Lottery, and The Election series), industrialists (The South Sea Scheme), clerics, the lower, middle, and upper classes. However, Hogarth also offered strikingly sympathetic representations of, for example, professional women: seamstresses, milkmaids, ballad-sellers, fish-girls, and actresses. His engaging Strolling Actresses Dressing in a Barn (1738), issued with the Four Times of Day print series, can be regarded as an icon of working-class women. His lucidly executed painting The Shrimp Girl (c. 1745; National Gallery, London) expresses the natural virtue of "common people" and, possibly, the nation. Hogarth's social didacticism emerged most strongly in his graphic series Industry and Idleness (1747) and the diptych Beer Street and Gin Lane (1751), which offer the viewer a rhetorical choice between good and evil.

Although one may recognize the moral thrust of Hogarth's works, it is difficult to align them with a single authorial voice. His work established a mode of British urban narrative marked by multiplicity, ambiguity, and trenchant humor.

HOGARTH, WILLIAM (1697–1764)

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