Hogarth, William

Hogarth, William (1697-1764), English painter and engraver, noted for his observation of English manners and customs and for his satirization of the excesses of his age. He was the dominant artistic personality in England in the first half of the 18th century and the painter who did most to establish a distinctive English school of painting.

He was born in London on November 10, 1697, the son of an impoverished schoolteacher. At the age of 17 he became apprenticed to a silver-engraver but in 1720 he left to set up an engraving shop of his own. The business was concerned with producing engravings of book illustrations. Hogarth’s earliest notable works include illustrations (1726) to “Hudibras”, a poem satirizing Puritanism, by Samuel Butler. In 1720 he had enrolled at the academy of art newly founded by John Vanderbank in St Martin’s Lane, where he learnt to paint in oils. In 1724 he studied at Sir James Thornhill’s free academy in St Martin’s Lane.

By 1729 Hogarth had achieved major success with The Beggar’s Opera (1729-1731, Tate Gallery, London), a painting that depicts a scene from the popular play (a social satire) of that title by John Gay. The painting proved to be so popular that Hogarth produced five more versions. Hogarth had married Thornhill’s daughter in 1729, and through his father-in-law he was able to gain access to wealthy patrons, who commissioned him to paint small “conversation pieces”. Hogarth produced many of these lively, though relatively cheap, paintings of family groups in the 1730s such as A Fishing Party (Dulwich Picture Gallery) and Ashley Cowper with his Wife and Daughter (Tate Gallery). However, he did not consider these paintings to be challenging enough and a sketch of the morning awakening of a young prostitute led him to produce a series of six canvases (now lost) of the story of how she arrived in her situation. From there was born the series of engravings The Harlot’s Progress (c. 1731), which shows how a young country girl arrives in London, is lured with promises of wealth into prostitution and thence to prison, disease, and death. The huge success of these works, through their humour, pathos, and topicality, was followed by The Rake’s Progress (c. 1733, Sir John Soane Museum), a series of paintings in a similar vein, through which Hogarth exposed the corruption and foolishness of polite society and its hangers-on. Hogarth did not issue engravings of the series until he had instituted an engraver’s copyright act in 1735. After the spectacular success that followed the publication of The Rake’s Progress, Hogarth painted a series of scenes of London life entitled The Four Times of Day (c. 1736, private collections, Upton House, and Grimsthorpe Castle). He also painted the spectacularly grand portrait of Thomas Coram (1740, Foundling Hospital, London) and decorative paintings in the style of Thornhill. From 1735 to 1737 he worked on The Good Samaritan and The Pool of Bethesda, murals for the staircase wall of St Bartholomew’s Hospital, which are two of his most ambitious, although least characteristic, works. Furthermore, in the late 1730s he became a spokesman for British painters and, through public statements and the use of the Foundling Hospital as an exhibition space for British painting, challenged the current taste for the work of foreign artists (such as Jacopo Amigoni and J. B. Van Loo) and the old masters. He encouraged history painting and founded an anti-academic tradition in English painting through his creation of the intermediate form of “comic history”. The best-known example of this type of painting is his series Marriage à la Mode (1734, National Gallery, London), which was engraved for him in Paris in 1745. Hogarth’s remarkably exuberant satire of a marriage entered into for money, his pungent observation of upper-class life, and his mastery of complex scenes find perhaps their highest expression in this series, generally considered to be his finest work. To this period also belong many of Hogarth’s portraits. Among the most important are David Garrick as Richard III (1745, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool) and Self-Portrait with a Pug (1745, Tate Gallery, London). Far from the artifice and flattery of the work of such portraitists as Gainsborough and Reynolds, these portraits have an earthy directness and truth.

At the same time, Hogarth was setting out his theories of painting, resulting in the publication of The Analysis of Beauty in 1753, in which the author claims that the essence of beauty lies in the “line of grace”, or “line of beauty”: a gracefully S-shaped vertical curve. Four years later he was appointed Sergeant Painter to George II.

In the late 1750s and early 1760s Hogarth was disillusioned with art and working very little. However, financial need and attacks by his countrymen on the new king, George III, led in 1762 to his producing an emblematic print, The Times, Plate 1, which attacked the government and merchants but which was given a hostile reception. During the last five years of his life, Hogarth was engaged in political feuds with the controversial British political reformer John Wilkes, whom he had satirized in an engraving. Wilkes retaliated with an attack on Hogarth’s painting Sigismonda Mourning over the Heart of Guiscardo (1759, Tate Gallery, London). Despite the acrimonious atmosphere in which Hogarth now found himself, his painting remained sensuous, rich, and spontaneous, as can be seen in two important late portraits, The Shrimp Girl (undated, National Gallery, London) and Hogarth’s Servants (1750-1755, Tate Gallery, London), the latter painted with tangible affection. Hogarth’s last engraving, The Bathos, intended as a farewell work, was published in 1764. He died in London and was buried in Chiswick. On his monument is an epitaph written by his friend, the actor David Garrick.