William Hogarth
William Hogarth was an English painter, engraver, satirist, cartoonist and writer. His work ranges from realistic portraiture to comic strip-like series of pictures called "modern moral subjects", and he is perhaps best known for his series A Harlot's Progress, A Rake's Progress and Marriage A-la-Mode. Familiarity with his work is so widespread that satirical political illustrations in this style are often referred to as "Hogarthian".
Hogarth was born in the City of London into a lower-middle-class family. In his youth he took up an apprenticeship with an engraver, but did not complete the apprenticeship. 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.
Influenced by French and Italian painting and engraving, Hogarth's works are mostly satirical caricatures, sometimes bawdily sexual, mostly of the first rank of realistic portraiture. They became widely popular and mass-produced via prints in his lifetime, and he was by far the most significant English artist of his generation. Charles Lamb deemed Hogarth's images to be books, filled with "the teeming, fruitful, suggestive meaning of words. Other pictures we look at; his pictures we read."
Early life
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.Young Hogarth also took a lively interest in the street life of the metropolis and the London fairs, and amused himself by sketching the characters he saw. Around the same time, his father, who had opened an unsuccessful Latin-speaking coffee house at St John's Gate, was imprisoned for debt in the Fleet Prison for five years. Hogarth never spoke of his father's imprisonment.
In 1720, Hogarth enrolled at the original St Martin's Lane Academy in Peter Court, London, which was run by Louis Chéron and John Vanderbank. He attended alongside other future leading figures in art and design, such as Joseph Highmore, William Kent, and Arthur Pond. The academy seems to have stopped operating in 1724, at around the same time that Vanderbank fled to France in order to avoid creditors. Hogarth recalled of the first incarnation of the academy: "this lasted a few years but the treasurer sinking the subscription money the lamp stove etc were seized for rent and the whole affair put a stop to."
Hogarth then enrolled in another drawing school, in Covent Garden, shortly after it opened in November 1724, which was run by Sir James Thornhill, serjeant painter to George I. On Thornhill, Hogarth later claimed that, even as an apprentice, "the painting of St Pauls and greewich hospital... were during this time in my head", referring to the massive schemes of decoration painted by Thornhill for the dome of St Paul's Cathedral, and the Painted Hall at Greenwich Hospital.
Hogarth became a member of the Rose and Crown Club, with Peter Tillemans, George Vertue, Michael Dahl, and other artists and connoisseurs.
Career
By April 1720, Hogarth was an engraver in his own right, at first engraving coats of arms and shop bills and designing plates for booksellers.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.
Early works
Early satirical works included an Emblematical Print on the South Sea Scheme, about the disastrous stock market crash of 1720, known as the South Sea Bubble, in which many English people lost a great deal of money. In the bottom left corner, he shows Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Jewish figures gambling, while in the middle there is a huge machine, like a merry-go-round, which people are boarding. At the top is a goat, written below which is "Who'l Ride". The people are scattered around the picture with a sense of disorder, while the progress of the well dressed people towards the ride in the middle shows the foolishness of the crowd in buying stock in the South Sea Company, which spent more time issuing stock than anything else.Other early works include The Lottery ; The Mystery of Masonry brought to Light by the Gormagons ; 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.
File:Hudibras Triumphant - William Hogarth - 50-1929-10.jpg|alt=An engraving depicting Hudibras overcoming a fiddle player and placing him in the stocks. Above the stocks, the fiddle and its case are displayed.|thumb|Hudibras Triumphant, one of the twelve engravings illustrating the adventures of Hudibras, a bumbling adventurer from Samuel Butler's mock-heroic poem.
In 1726, Hogarth prepared twelve large engravings illustrating Samuel Butler's Hudibras.
These he himself valued highly, and they are among his best early works, though they are based on small book illustrations.
In the following years, he turned his attention to the production of small "conversation pieces". Among his efforts in oil between 1728 and 1732 were The Fountaine Family, The Assembly at Wanstead House, The House of Commons examining Bambridge, and several pictures of the chief actors in John Gay's popular The Beggar's Opera. One of his real-life subjects was Sarah Malcolm, whom he sketched two days before her execution.
One of Hogarth's masterpieces of this period is the depiction of an amateur performance by children of John Dryden's The Indian Emperour or The Conquest of Mexico by Spaniards, being the Sequel of The Indian Queen at the home of John Conduitt, master of the mint, in St George's Street, Hanover Square.
Hogarth's other works in the 1730s include A Midnight Modern Conversation, Southwark Fair, The Sleeping Congregation, Before and After, Scholars at a Lecture, The Company of Undertakers, The Distrest Poet, The Four Times of the Day, and Strolling Actresses Dressing in a Barn. He may also have printed Burlington Gate, evoked by Alexander Pope's Epistle to Lord Burlington, and defending James Brydges, 1st Duke of Chandos, who is therein satirized. This print gave great offence, and was suppressed. However, modern authorities such as Ronald Paulson no longer attribute it to Hogarth.
Moralizing art
''Harlot's Progress'' and ''Rake's Progress''
In 1731, Hogarth completed the earliest of his series of moral works, a body of work that led to wide 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.The inaugural series was an immediate success and was followed in 1733–1735 by the sequel A Rake's Progress. The second instalment consisted of eight pictures that depicted the reckless life of Tom Rakewell, the son of a rich merchant, who spends all of his money on luxurious living, services from prostitutes, and gambling – the character's life ultimately ends in Bethlem Royal Hospital. The original paintings of A Harlot's Progress were destroyed in the fire at Fonthill House in 1755; the oil paintings of A Rake's Progress are displayed in the gallery room at Sir John Soane's Museum, London, UK.
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 recognise the authorial rights of an individual artist.
''Marriage A-la-Mode''
In 1743–1745, Hogarth painted the six pictures of Marriage A-la-Mode, a pointed skewering of upper-class 18th-century society. An engraved version of the same series, produced by French engravers, appeared in 1745. This moralistic warning shows the miserable tragedy of an ill-considered marriage for money. This is regarded by many as his finest project and may be among his best-planned story serials.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 Viscount Squanderfield, the son of bankrupt Earl Squander, to the daughter of a wealthy but miserly city merchant, starting with the signing of a marriage contract at the Earl's grand house 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.
William Makepeace Thackeray wrote: