Hogarth, William (1697-1764)

A scene from Hogarth's A Rake's Progress (1735) set in Bedlam, London's main hospital for the insane at the time. Sightseers, such as the two women in the background, could pay to look at the inmates chained up in their cells.

‘An Emblematic Print on the South Sea’ by William Hogarth, 1724. To the left, the Devil carves up the figure of Fortune and throws it to the crowd. In the centre of the scene, investors ride the financial merry-go-round. Honesty is strapped to the wheel at the bottom, being tortured by Self-Interest. At the bottom right, Trade lies languishing on the ground. Hogarth (1697-1764) was an English painter and engraver who used his artwork as a medium for critical social commentary.

English painter and engraver. He produced portraits and moralizing genre scenes, such as the story series of prints A Rake's Progress (1735; Soane Museum, London). His portraits are remarkably direct and full of character, for example Heads of Six of Hogarth's Servants (c. 1750-55; Tate Gallery, London) and his oil sketch masterpiece The Shrimp Girl (National Gallery, London).

He published A Harlot's Progress, a series of six engravings, in 1732. Other story series followed, including Marriage à la Mode (1745), Industry and Idleness (1749), and The Four Stages of Cruelty (1751). A stern critic of ‘phizmongering’ (traditional portrait painting), his book The Analysis of Beauty (1753) also attacked the uncritical appreciation of the arts, advocating the double curved line and serpentine spiral as a key to visual beauty (both traceable in the composition of his own work).

His house in Hogarth Lane, Chiswick, is now a museum.

Hogarth was born in London and apprenticed to an engraver. He first became known as an engraver through his plates for Samuel Butler's poem Hudibras. He then turned to painting, which he seems to have studied at the academy in St Martin's Lane. His early paintings were small family groups or conversation pieces; for example, the Wanstead Assembly and the Fountaine Family (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania). A stepping stone between these and his famous pictures of the social scene was his rendering of the Beggar's Opera (about 1730), of which three versions exist (showing both actors and distinguished spectators on the stage). He then turned to the larger stage of London life in the series A Harlot's Progress, painted and engraved, though the paintings no longer exist. In engraving the series won immediate popularity.

There is subsequently no consecutive pattern in his work. A Rake's Progress was followed by an attempt at the ‘great style of history painting’, and the biblical compositions (coolly received) for St Bartholomew's Hospital. Thereafter he produced paintings and engravings of individual subjects of social or satirical import, portraits, and further series, Marriage à la Mode and The Election (Soane Museum) being the most outstanding. Later his Sigismonda Mourning over the Heart of Guiscardo (1759; Tate Gallery, London), an attempt to outdo Correggio, attracted much criticism. His genius was at its height in the 1740s, with the best of the story series, the Marriage à la Mode (1745; Tate); the March of the Guards towards Scotland (1746; Foundling Hospital); and his O the Roast Beef of Old England or Calais Gate (1748; National Gallery).

Hogarth has been misrepresented in various ways. He was not an enemy of the old masters but of darkened varnish and of affected connoisseurs who deprecated native talent and overpraised foreign mediocrities. His handling of paint shows an intelligent study of 18th-century French art. The moralizing for which he is often aesthetically blamed was a simple device enabling him to give a comprehensive picture of an age. Gin Lane, for instance, is a masterpiece of graphic art apart from its ‘lesson’. In 1751 he retired to his house at Chiswick and wrote Analysis of Beauty.

He was given a minor official status by George III in 1757 but his later years after Sigismonda were unproductive, and he was drawn into the controversy against the Radical politician John Wilkes and the journalist Charles Churchill.