William Hogarth

British, 1697 - 1764

BiographyBritish painter and engraver, who played a crucial part in establishing a native school of painting free from continental domination. He did this by identifying himself with those forces in early 18th-century British culture which were forging a new, more prosperous nation. These forces can be summed up as London-based, rabidly mercantile, individualistic, politically liberal, irreverent, xenophobic, not overshadowed by a powerful church or court, and rather coarse. Hogarth was the son of an unsuccessful Latin scholar and coffee-house proprietor who spent time in prison for debt. The artist was apprenticed to a silver-plate engraver and by 1720 was in business on his own. In the same year, he studied life drawing at an academy in St Martin's Lane, London, and in 1721–4 published prints satirizing the financial scandals of the day and attacking the contemporary taste for Italian architecture and music. In 1728 he executed his first significant oil painting, The Beggar's Opera (several versions, of which the best, 1731, is in London, Tate), which illustrated the climactic scene from John Gay's popular opera based on English folk tunes. In the early 1730s, he took up the new genre of the conversation piece and from c. 1740 began painting portraits on the scale of life, to earn money and to hold his own with his fellow artists.

Contemporary drama and novels provided Hogarth with analogies for the composition of his ‘modern moral subjects’ (his own phrase). These were series devised in six or eight scenes unfolding in each case a cautionary tale of vanity, corruption, and betrayal leading to decline and death. Strikingly inventive and filled with vivid characterizations and a wealth of detail, they were instantly popular, in their engraved form, and they remain Hogarth's most famous works. The first was A Harlot's Progress (1731; paintings lost; engraved 1732), followed by A Rake's Progress (1733–4; London, Soane Mus.; engraved 1735). Then came the more ‘upmarket’ Marriage à la Mode (1743; London, NG; engraved 1745), for which Hogarth employed a more refined style of painting and hired specialist French engravers. Afterwards he adopted a more directly didactic approach, used engraving only, and aimed for a lower-class audience. He did this in Industry and Idleness (1747), Beer Street and Gin Lane (1751), and the Four Stages of Cruelty (1751). Finally, in 1754–5, he reverted to the satirical mode and to painting in the four scenes of The Election (London, Soane Mus.).

Another, different expression of Hogarth's wish for the improvement of society was his interest in hospitals. In 1736–7, he painted, without fee, the staircase walls of St Bartholomew's Hospital, close to where he had been born, with appropriate biblical scenes in a high Baroque style. He was also a keen supporter of the Foundling Hospital, inaugurated in 1739 by Captain Thomas Coram. For this institution, he portrayed Coram seated full-length, in the Grand Manner (1740), contributed two other paintings of his own, and persuaded other artists to present pictures—with the result that the hospital both benefited from the sale of admission tickets and became a showcase for contemporary British painting. (All the paintings still hang in the administration block of the Foundling Hospital, London, although the hospital itself no longer exists). As this venture shows, Hogarth was far from being only a popular recorder of the seamier side of London life. He was deeply concerned about the prospects for the artistic profession in Britain, which he felt was held back by lack of patronage, other than for portraiture, and he was an original if somewhat muddled thinker about the problems of high art. In 1735, he had founded a second academy in St Martin's Lane and ran it for 20 years as a centre of lively discussion as well as professional practice, much of the former being reflected in his treatise The Analysis of Beauty (1753).

Kitson, Michael. "Hogarth, William." In The Oxford Companion to Western Art, edited by Hugh Brigstocke. Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/subscriber/article/opr/t118/e1219 (accessed May 1, 2012).

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