William Hogarth
The painter of English satire.
Hogarth painted and engraved picture series on morality and vice, such as A Rake's Progress. The prints were sold cheaply to a wide public.
William Hogarth was born in London in 1697. His father was a schoolmaster and Latin writer but failed with a coffee house and spent several years in a debtors' prison. The experience of poverty and shame left its mark on his son's art. Hogarth was apprenticed to a silver engraver, where he learned to cut precise lines in metal. He then studied drawing at private art academies in London. In 1729 he married Jane Thornhill, daughter of the court painter James Thornhill, without her parents' consent.
His breakthrough came with an entirely new kind of art: painted and engraved picture series that tell a story in several scenes, rather like a play. The first was A Harlot's Progress, about a young woman from the country who comes to ruin in London. The engravings were published in 1732 and sold in large editions. Next came A Rake's Progress (1733–35), about a rich heir who squanders everything and ends up in the madhouse. The paintings are in Sir John Soane's Museum in London. The series Marriage A-la-Mode (c. 1743–45), about an arranged marriage between money and nobility, hangs in the National Gallery in London. The engravings Gin Lane and Beer Street (1751) compare the devastation caused by gin with wholesome beer.
Hogarth worked with a sharp eye for detail. Every object in the picture carries meaning: a painting on the wall, a dog, a letter on the floor. The viewer is meant to read the picture closely and draw conclusions. He was also a skilled portrait painter. The portrait of Captain Thomas Coram (1740), founder of a home for foundlings, is now in the Foundling Museum in London. In his book The Analysis of Beauty (1753) he tried to explain beauty through a serpentine “line of beauty”.
Because his engravings were often pirated, Hogarth campaigned for a law protecting engravers' rights to their images. It was passed in 1735 and is sometimes called Hogarth's Act. He was proud to be English and mocked the fashion for buying foreign old masters. He had no children but was closely involved with the Foundling Hospital. His pug Trump appears in a self-portrait of 1745 in Tate Britain. Hogarth died in London in 1764.
Hogarth is regarded as the father of British satire. Caricaturists such as James Gillray and Thomas Rowlandson built on his work. His picture series are often seen as an ancestor of comics and of socially critical photojournalism. In English the word “Hogarthian” is used of teeming, cruel and comic scenes of city life.