William Hogarth (1697-1764) rose from humble beginnings to become a great British painter and engraver and Serjeant Painter to the King.
Early life
Hogarth was born in the City of London into a lower-middle-class family. His father underwent periods of mixed fortune and was at one time imprisoned in lieu of payment of outstanding debts, an event that is thought to have informed William's paintings and prints with a hard edge.
In his youth he was apprenticed to the engraver Ellis Gamble in Leicester Fields, where he learnt to engrave trade cards and similar products. In 1720, Hogarth enrolled at the original St Martin's Lane Academy in Peter Court, London, where he began to further his education in painting, a much more socially respectable skill than engraving. He did not leave engraving behind but rather turned it to his own purposes, designing and selling satiric engravings that comically ridiculed some contemporary fashions and fiascos. The academy seems to have stopped operating in 1724. Hogarth then enrolled in another drawing school, in Covent Garden, run by Sir James Thornhill, Serjeant Painter to George I, shortly after it opened in November 1724.
Young Hogarth took a lively interest in the street life and the London fairs. He amused himself by sketching the characters he saw. Sociable and fond of fun, a keen and humorous observer of human behaviour, with a special love of the theatre and shows of all kinds, he was evidently a convivial companion. Never prudish, he knew the exuberant life of the London streets, bawdy houses, fairs, and theatres first hand and derived from them a fertile appreciation of the vitality of popular tradition. He felt drawn to the coffeehouses and taverns frequented by writers, musicians, actors, and liberal professionals, forming lasting friendships in such lively intellectual circles.
Career
In many ways, Hogarth seems like an unlikely father of British culture. His most famous artworks, such as the series A Harlot's Progress (1732), A Rake's Progress (1734) and Marriage à-la Mode (1743), are difficult to understand with their massive cast of characters, intricate plotlines, complex symbols, and obscure historic references.
 | The renowned self-portrait from 1745—widely regarded as a pinnacle in Hogarth’s career—also served as a bold artistic statement. With characteristic wit, he placed his own forthright and intelligent features alongside those of his sturdy pug, Trump. Nearby, he included volumes by three towering figures of English literature: William Shakespeare, John Milton, and Jonathan Swift. Resting beside them was a painter’s palette bearing the elegant “line of beauty,” Hogarth’s emblem for the richness, complexity, and expressive power of Nature. |
Apart from a gratifying commission for a large history piece, which he won from the lawyers of Lincoln’s Inn, Hogarth concentrated for the next few years on simple, didactic prints executed from drawings, not paintings, and aimed at an unrefined public. Beer Street, Gin Lane (FA2010.11), and Four Stages of Cruelty (1751) he cut deliberately crudely on wood blocks to make them cheaper and facilitate a wide distribution. Industry and Idleness (1747) contains, in addition to its obvious moral message, a good deal of self-dramatization, depicting the virtuous apprentice made good in a hostile world.
Hogarth lived in circumstances that favoured the development and appreciation of his genius, personal inventiveness and industriousness. He hated injustice and used his art to draw attention to the issues he cared about – poverty, drunkenness, political corruption, cruelty to animals. He also took practical steps to deal with these issues, promoting the first copyright legislation in 1735 and serving as a founder Governor of the Foundling Hospital.
The crucial turning point of William Hogarth’s career came when, after some success painting so-called conversation pictures of people and scenes of interest to wealthy art collectors, he dedicated himself to “painting and engraving modern moral subjects.” These works typically involve a series of highly detailed pictures that tell a dramatic story about a person’s sudden rise and fall.
A Harlot’s Progress (1731-1732), for example, requires only six plates to follow a young country woman’s decline: from her arrival in town, which places her in the hands of a bawdy woman; through several stages as an increasingly dependent, pathetic, and sickly prostitute; then finally to her funeral in a room filled with other prostitutes oblivious to the dismal lesson of her life. Although Hogarth is rarely “preachy,” much of his satire presupposes a world that refuses to turn from its folly and wickedness. A Harlot’s Progress, instantly caught on for many reasons, not the least of which is that in it Hogarth expertly pictured a seedy but instantly recognizable part of London life and populated it with likenesses of real people who were currently infamous for their vices or crimes.
Analogous to A Harlot’s Progress, The Rake’s Progress follows a young man through a predictable, though dramatic, decline. Material success, Hogarth seems to suggest, is no substitute for humility and common decency: The Rake has all the advantages of wealth, but he wastes himself in a series of debaucheries, powerfully anatomized in eight engravings, that end not in death but in madness. Hogarth returned to the pattern of these two “progresses” later in his career: Marriage à la Mode (1745) shows the disintegration of an arranged marriage between two prideful and irresponsible people, and Industry and Idleness (1747) contrasts the fates of two men, one of whom prospers through hard work while the other wastes his time and ends up hanged as a criminal. One great example of this is the first scene of Marriage à-la-Mode in which two fathers are coming to terms over the arranged marriage of their offspring. One ("the Earl of Squander") is aristocratic but poor; the other is middle-class and wealthy. One will gain money through the marriage; the other social prestige. Love, clearly, is not a factor – hence the irony of the title, which translates as "The Fashionable Marriage".
Because of its tremendous popularity, A Harlot’s Progress was not only imitated but also pirated, reproduced in editions that brought no profit to Hogarth or to his publisher. As a result, Hogarth delayed the publication of his next major work until the adoption of a parliamentary act in 1735 safeguarding copyright protection for engravers. Though he perhaps could have lived reasonably well supported by his wealthy patrons, he used these contacts to help devise and enact a law that would make such dependence unnecessary. His work in hand, The Rake’s Progress (1735), was not only an imaginative work of art but also a valuable property, and Hogarth was very careful about its marketing as well as its creation.
The invention of complex narratives based on the kinds of people you see around you in cities was a very clever entrepreneurial move by Hogarth. He poured scorn on the debauchery of modern lives – but his art also enticed customers who wanted to be spectators of sensation and scandal. As a result, A Harlot's Progress, A Rake's Progress and Marriage à-la-Mode were all fabulous successes, establishing the artist's fame and financial security.
The latter part of his life, though, was not so encouraging. Despite the tremendous popularity of his engravings, which went through numerous editions, he found himself increasingly isolated and, he believed, neglected. He was not offered commissions he eagerly sought, and he repeatedly found that his call for a strong English style of painting resistant to stale classical techniques and subjects was not being heeded.
Hogarth’s appointment as Serjeant-Painter to the King (George II) in 1757 was not enough to bolster his spirits. He spent the last years of his life, it seems, fighting losing battles, defending his politics and his theories of art, but perhaps more generally trying to keep at an arm’s length the assorted follies and evils he had satirized in his life’s work. A late self-portrait, The Artist Painting the Comic Muse (1758), shows him in the process of trying to capture his noble subject, but his body is angular, almost contorted, radiating intensity but no confidence. His last engraving is a vision of failure. At the time of his death on October 26, 1764, Hogarth may well have felt overwhelmed by the combined forces of decay he had so energetically contested.
In a sense it was prophetic, for, as the 19th-century English painter John Constable rightly remarked, “Hogarth has no school, nor has he ever been imitated with tolerable success.” His immediate influence had been more strongly felt in literature than in painting, and after his death, it was significantly the Romantics, many of whose ideas Hogarth had anticipated, who first recognised his greatness.
Alice Insley (assistant curator of historic British art at Tate Britain) believes that Hogarth's popularity in the past explains his influence on the present. "Hogarth is such a rich artist in terms of how many strands there are to his art," she says, adding that there was also something unique about his approach. "His influence on future artists may have been down to his critical outlook, and his originality in claiming independence. He carefully positioned himself as a social critic, someone shining a light on society."
Even in the later 20th Century, Hogarth's social commentary continued to have resonance. After a visit to New York in 1961, David Hockney made 16 etchings describing his imagined adventures and moral decline in the Big Apple called A Rake's Progress.
But perhaps Hogarth's greatest bequest is the way he handled satire. He mocked a great array of people and their shortcomings, and no one, no matter where they sat on the social hierarchy, was spared. It was this aspect of Hogarth that inspired Lubaina Himid (a pioneer of the Black Art Movement and winner of the Turner Prize in 2017) to recreate the fourth scene of Hogarth's Marriage à-la-Mode, Toilette Scene in her installation A Fashionable Marriage in 1987.
Hogarth left a sizeable legacy to art with his innovative approach to image-making. He treated contemporary urban life and social criticism as the subjects of art, perfected a new art form (the multi-image series), and devised his own, highly nuanced visual language. But what will make his art perpetually modern is his engagement with the changes that he saw in the word around him. His art asked questions of society but it seldom gave easy answers.
From our 21st-Century vantage, William Hogarth is arguably Britain's most influential visual artist. Key contemporary artists, including David Hockney and Grayson Perry, have paid explicit homage to his work over the past decades.
The HCT Hogarth collection
The HCT is lucky to possess a number of his works including 89 prints gifted by Mrs H J Woods from Basingstoke in 1967 and the Complete works of William Hogarth (B2010.15) in a series of one hundred and fifty superb engravings on steel from the original pictures with an introductory essay by James Hannay and descriptive letterpress by the Rev J Trusler and E F Roberts, published in London by the London Printing and Publishing Co in [nd c] 1860 which Belonged to George Thorne organist of Holy Trinity Weymouth D 1926 bt of his son 3 June 1926