William Hogarth was an English painter, printmaker, pictorial satirist, social critic, and editorial cartoonist who has been credited with pioneering western sequential art.
Contents 1 Early life 2 Career 2.1 Early works 2.2 Moralizing art 2.2.1 Harlot's and Rake's Progresses 2.2.2 Marriage à-la-mode 2.2.3 Industry and Idleness 2.2.4 Beer Street and Gin Lane 2.2.5 The Four Stages of Cruelty 2.3 Portraits 2.4 Historical subjects 2.4.1 Biblical scenes 2.4.2 The Gate of Calais 2.5 Other later works 2.6 Writing 3 Analysis 3.1 Painter and engraver of modern moral subjects 3.2 Parodic borrowings from the Old Masters 4 Personal life 5 Influence and reputation 6 Selected works 7 See also 8 Notes 9 References 10 External links
William Hogarth was born at Bartholomew Close in London to Richard Hogarth, a poor Latin school teacher and textbook writer, and Anne Gibbons. In his youth he was apprenticed to the engraver Ellis Gamble in Leicester Fields, where he learned to engrave trade cards and similar products.
Hogarth became a member of the Rose and Crown Club, with Peter Tillemans, George Vertue, Michael Dahl, and other artists and connoisseurs.
Career See also: List of works by William Hogarth
In 1727, he was hired by Joshua Morris, a tapestry worker, to prepare a design for the Element of Earth. Morris heard that he was "an engraver, and no painter", and consequently declined the work when completed. Hogarth accordingly sued him for the money in the Westminster Court, where the case was decided in his favour on 28 May 1728. In 1757 he was appointed Serjeant Painter to the King.
Early works The Assembly at Wanstead House. Earl Tylney and family in foreground
Other early works include The Lottery ; The Mystery of Masonry brought to Light by the Gormogons ; A Just View of the British Stage ; some book illustrations; and the small print Masquerades and Operas . The latter is a satire on contemporary follies, such as the masquerades of the Swiss impresario John James Heidegger, the popular Italian opera singers, John Rich's pantomimes at Lincoln's Inn Fields, and the exaggerated popularity of Lord Burlington's protégé, the architect and painter William Kent. He continued that theme in 1727, with the Large Masquerade Ticket. In 1726 Hogarth prepared twelve large engravings for Samuel Butler's Hudibras.
Self-Portrait by Hogarth, ca. 1735, Yale Center for British Art.
One of Hogarth's masterpieces of this period is the depiction of an amateur performance by children of John Dryden's The Indian Emperor, or The Conquest of Mexico at the home of John Conduitt, master of the mint, in St George's Street, Hanover Square.
In 1731 Hogarth completed the earliest of his series of moral works, a body of work that led to significant recognition. The collection of six scenes was entitled A Harlot's Progress and appeared first as paintings before being published as engravings. A Harlot's Progress depicts the fate of a country girl who begins prostituting—the six scenes are chronological, starting with a meeting with a bawd and ending with a funeral ceremony that follows the character's death from venereal disease.
When the success of A Harlot’s Progress and A Rake's Progress resulted in numerous pirated reproductions by unscrupulous printsellers, Hogarth lobbied in parliament for greater legal control over the reproduction of his and other artists' work. The result was the Engravers’ Copyright Act , which became law on 25 June 1735 and was the first copyright law to deal with visual works as well as the first to recognize the authorial rights of an individual artist.
Marriage à-la-mode Marriage à-la-mode, Shortly After the Marriage . Marriage à-la-mode, After the old Earl's funeral
Marital ethics were the topic of much debate in 18th-century Britain. The many marriages of convenience and their attendant unhappiness came in for particular criticism, with a variety of authors taking the view that love was a much sounder basis for marriage. Hogarth here painted a satire – a genre that by definition has a moral point to convey – of a conventional marriage within the English upper class. All the paintings were engraved and the series achieved wide circulation in print form. The series, which is set in a Classical interior, shows the story of the fashionable marriage of the son of bankrupt Earl Squanderfield to the daughter of a wealthy but miserly city merchant, starting with the signing of a marriage contract at the Earl's mansion and ending with the murder of the son by his wife's lover and the suicide of the daughter after her lover is hanged at Tyburn for murdering her husband.
This famous set of pictures contains the most important and highly wrought of the Hogarth comedies. The care and method with which the moral grounds of these pictures are laid is as remarkable as the wit and skill of the observing and dexterous artist. He has to describe the negotiations for a marriage pending between the daughter of a rich citizen Alderman and young Lord Viscount Squanderfield, the dissipated son of a gouty old Earl ... The dismal end is known. My lord draws upon the counselor, who kills him, and is apprehended while endeavouring to escape. My lady goes back perforce to the Alderman of the City, and faints upon reading Counsellor Silvertongue's dying speech at Tyburn , where the counselor has been 'executed for sending his lordship out of the world. Moral: don’t listen to evil silver-tongued counselors; don't marry a man for his rank, or a woman for her money; don't frequent foolish auctions and masquerade balls unknown to your husband; don't have wicked companions abroad and neglect your wife, otherwise you will be run through the body, and ruin will ensue, and disgrace, and Tyburn.
In the twelve prints of Industry and Idleness Hogarth shows the progression in the lives of two apprentices, one of whom is dedicated and hard working, while the other, who is idle, commits crime and is eventually executed. This shows the work ethic of Protestant England, where those who work hard get rewarded, such as the industrious apprentice who becomes Sheriff , Alderman , and finally the Lord Mayor of London in the last plate in the series. The idle apprentice, who begins "at play in the church yard" , holes up "in a Garrett with a Common Prostitute" after turning highwayman and "executed at Tyburn" . The idle apprentice is sent to the gallows by the industrious apprentice himself.
Beer Street and Gin Lane This section does not cite any references or sources. Please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Gin Lane
Hogarth's friend, the magistrate Henry Fielding, may have enlisted Hogarth to help with propaganda for the Gin Act: Beer Street and Gin Lane were issued shortly after his work An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers, and Related Writings, and addressed the same issues.
The Four Stages of Cruelty This section does not cite any references or sources. Please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed.
Hogarth was also a popular portrait painter. In 1746 he painted actor David Garrick as Richard III, for which he was paid £200, "which was more," he wrote, "than any English artist ever received for a single portrait." In the same year a sketch of Simon Fraser, 11th Lord Lovat, afterwards beheaded on Tower Hill, had an exceptional success. In 1740 he created a truthful, vivid full-length portrait of his friend, the philanthropic Captain Coram for the Thomas Coram Foundation for Children, now in the Foundling Museum), and his unfinished oil sketch of The Shrimp Girl , may be called masterpieces of British painting. There are also portraits of his wife and his two sisters, and of many other people, among them Bishop Hoadly and Bishop Herring.
Historical subjects
Examples of his history pictures are The Pool of Bethesda and The Good Samaritan, executed in 1736–1737 for St Bartholomew's Hospital; Moses brought before Pharaoh's Daughter, painted for the Foundling Hospital ; Paul before Felix at Lincoln's Inn; and his altarpiece for St. Mary Redcliffe, Bristol .
The Gate of Calais
he went to France, and was so imprudent as to be taking a sketch of the drawbridge at Calais. He was seized and carried to the governor, where he was forced to prove his vocation by producing several caricatures of the French; particularly a scene of the shore, with an immense piece of beef landing for the lion d'argent, the English inn at Calais, and several hungry friars following it. They were much diverted with his drawings, and dismissed him.
Notable Hogarth engravings in the 1740s include The Enraged Musician , the six prints of Marriage à-la-mode , and The Stage Coach or The Country Inn Yard .
Others works included his ingenious Satire on False Perspective ; his satire on canvassing in his Election series ; his ridicule of the English passion for cockfighting in The Cockpit ; his attack on Methodism in Credulity, Superstition, and Fanaticism ; his political anti-war satire in The Times, plate I ; and his pessimistic view of all things in Tailpiece, or The Bathos .
Writing The Analysis of Beauty plate 1
Hogarth lived in an age when artwork became increasingly commercialized, being viewed in shop windows, taverns, and public buildings, and sold in printshops. Old hierarchies broke down, and new forms began to flourish: the ballad opera, the bourgeois tragedy, and especially, a new form of fiction called the novel with which authors such as Henry Fielding had great success. Therefore, by that time, Hogarth hit on a new idea: "painting and engraving modern moral subjects ... to treat my subjects as a dramatic writer; my picture was my stage", as he himself remarked in his manuscript notes.
When analysing the work of the artist as a whole, Ronald Paulson says, "In A Harlot's Progress, every single plate but one is based on Dürer's images of the story of the Virgin and the story of the Passion." In other works, he parodies Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper. According to Paulson, Hogarth is subverting the religious establishment and the orthodox belief in an immanent God who intervenes in the lives of people and produces miracles. Indeed, Hogarth was a Deist, a believer in a God who created the universe but takes no direct hand in the lives of his creations. Thus, as a "comic history painter", he often poked fun at the old-fashioned, "beaten" subjects of religious art in his paintings and prints. Hogarth also rejected Lord Shaftesbury's then-current ideal of the classical Greek male in favour of the living, breathing female. He said, "Who but a bigot, even to the antiques, will say that he has not seen faces and necks, hands and arms in living women, that even the Grecian Venus doth but coarsely imitate."
Personal life
Hogarth was initiated as a Freemason before 1728 in the Lodge at the Hand and Apple Tree Tavern, Little Queen Street, and later belonged to the Carrier Stone Lodge and the Grand Stewards' Lodge; the latter still possesses the 'Hogarth Jewel' which Hogarth designed for the Lodge's Master to wear. Today the original is in storage and a replica is worn by the Master of the Lodge. Freemasonry was a theme in some of Hogarth's work, most notably 'Night', the fourth in the quartet of paintings collectively entitled the Four Times of the Day.
Among his friends and acquaintances were many English artists and satirists of the period, such as Francis Hayman, Henry Fielding, and Laurence Sterne.
William and Jane Hogarth's tomb
Hogarth's works were a direct influence on John Collier, who was known as the "Lancashire Hogarth". The spread of Hogarth's prints throughout Europe, together with the depiction of popular scenes from his prints in faked Hogarth prints, influenced Continental book illustration through the 18th and early 19th century, especially in Germany and France. He also influenced many caricaturists of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. Hogarth's influence lives on today as artists continue to draw inspiration from his work.
Hogarth's House in Chiswick, west London, is now a museum; it abuts one of London's best known road junctions – the Hogarth Roundabout.
In 2014 both Hogarth's House and the Foundling Museum held special exhibitions to mark the 250th anniversary of his death.
Selected works
Before

Portrait of Inigo Jones, English Architect

William Jones, the Mathematician, 1740

Miss Mary Edwards 1742

The Gate of Calais , 1749

Hogarth Painting the Comic Muse. A self-portrait depicting Hogarth painting Thalia, the muse of comedy and pastoral poetry, 1757–1758

Hogarth's Servants, mid-1750s.

William Hogarth's Election series, Humours of an Election, plate 2
Engravings
Industry and Idleness, plate 11, The Idle 'Prentice executed at Tyburn