Painter and engraver, born in London, UK. By 1720 he had his own business as an engraver, and by the late 1720s as a portrait painter. Tiring of conventional art forms, he began his modern moral subjects, such as A Rake's Progress (17335), and his masterpiece, the Marriage à la Mode (17435, Tate, London). His crowded canvases are full of revealing details and pointed subplots. In 1743 he visited Paris, and followed this with several prints of low life, such as the Industry and Idleness series (1747).
| William Hogarth | |
|---|---|
| William Hogarth, self-portrait, 1745 | |
| Born |
10 November 1679 London, England |
| Died |
26 October 1764 London, England |
| Occupation | English painter, engraver |
William Hogarth (November 10, 1697 – October 26, 1764) was a major English painter, printmaker, pictorial satirist, and editorial cartoonist who has been credited as a pioneer in western sequential art. His work ranged from excellent realistic portraiture to comic strip-like series of pictures called “modern moral subjects.” Much of his work, though at times vicious, poked fun at contemporary politics and customs.
Life
The son of a poor schoolteacher and textbook writer, William Hogarth was born at Bartholomew Close in London on November 10, 1697. Hogarth never talked about the fact.
In 1727, he was hired by Joshua Morris, a tapestry worker, to prepare a design for the Element of Earth. Morris, however, having heard that he was "an engraver, and no painter", declined the work when completed, and Hogarth accordingly sued him for the money in the Westminster Court, where, on the May 28, 1728, the case was decided in Hogarth's favour.
On March 23, 1729 he was married to Jane Thornhill, daughter of artist Sir James Thornhill.
In 1757, he was appointed Serjeant Painter to the King.
Hogarth died in London on October 26, 1764 and was buried at St. Nicholas's Churchyard, Chiswick Mall, Chiswick, London.
Works
Early works
Early satirical works included an Emblematical Print on the South Sea Scheme (c.1721), 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.
Other early works include The Lottery (1724); In 1726 Hogarth prepared twelve large engravings for Samuel Butler's Hudibras.
In the following years he turned his attention to the production of small "conversation pieces" (i.e., groups in oil of full-length portraits from 12 to 15 in. Among his efforts in oil between 1728 and 1732 were The Fountaine Family (c.1730), 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 masterpieces of this period is the depiction of an amateur performance of John Dryden's The Indian Emperor, or The Conquest of Mexico (1732–1735) at the home of John Conduitt, master of the mint, in St George's Street, Hanover Square.
Hogarth's other prints in the 1730s include A Midnight Modern Conversation (1733), Southwark Fair (1733), The Sleeping Congregation (1736), Before and After (1736), Scholars at a Lecture (1736), The Company of Undertakers (Consultation of Quacks) (1736), The Distrest Poet (1736), The Four Times of the Day (1738), and Strolling Actresses dressing in a Barn (1738). (However, it is no longer attributed to Hogarth by some modern authorities.)
Moralizing Art
Harlot's and Rake's Progresses
In 1731, he completed the earliest of the series of moral works which first gave him his position as a great and original genius. The series was an immediate success, and was followed in 1735 by the sequel A Rake's Progress showing in eight pictures the reckless life of Tom Rakewell, the son of a rich merchant, who wastes all his money on luxurious living, whoring and gambling, and ultimately finishes his life in Bedlam.
Four Times of the Day
The Four Times of the Day series (1738) shows his version of the traditional times of the day theme in art; The next print, Noon, continues the theme, with well dressed people exiting the church on the right, while there are poorer people suffering on the left, a line in the middle of the picture in the road actually dividing the two classes.
Marriage à-la-mode
In 1743–1745 Hogarth painted the six pictures of Marriage à-la-mode (National Gallery, London), a pointed skewering of upper class 18th century society.
Marital ethics were the topic of much debate in 18th-century Britain. 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. The series, which are 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.
Industry and Idleness
In the twelve prints of Industry and Idleness (1747) Hogarth shows the progression in the lives of two apprentices, one who is dedicated and hard working, the other idle which leads to crime and his execution. This shows the work ethic of Protestant England, where those who work hard get rewarded, such as the industrious apprentice who becomes Sheriff (plate 8), Alderman (plate 10) and finally the Lord Mayor of London in the last plate in the series. The idle apprentice, who begins with being "at play in the church yard" (plate 3), ends up "in a Garrett with a Common Prostitute" (plate 7) and "executed at Tyburn" (plate 11) The idle apprentice is sent to the gallows by the industrious apprentice himself.
Beer Street and Gin Lane
Later important prints include his pictorial warning of the unpleasant consequences of alcoholism in Beer Street and Gin Lane (1751) Hogarth engraved Beer street to show a happy city drinking the 'good' beverage of English beer, versus Gin Lane that showed what would happen if people started drinking gin which, as a harder liquor, would cause more problems for society. The magistrate, Henry Fielding, supposedly informed Hogarth of these proceedings, to help with propaganda for a Gin Act, which his work An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers, and Related Writings hoped to achieve.
Four Stages of Cruelty
Other prints were his outcry against inhumanity in The Four Stages of Cruelty (1751); a series which Hogarth intended to show some of the terrible habits of criminals. Hogarth is thus using the series to say what will happen to people who carry on in this manner.
Portraits
Hogarth was also a popular portrait painter. Hogarth's truthful, vivid full-length portrait of his friend, the philanthropic Captain Coram (1740;
Historical subjects
During a long period of his life, Hogarth tried to achieve the status of history painter, but had no great success in this field.
Biblical scenes
Examples of his history pictures are The Pool of Bethesda and The Good Samaritan, executed in 1736–1737 for St Bartholomew's Hospital;
The Gate of Calais
The Gate of Calais (1748; Horace Walpole wrote that Hogarth had run a great risk to go there since the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle,
he went to France, and was so imprudent as to be taking a sketch of the drawbridge at Calais.
Back home, he immediately executed a painting of the subject in which he unkindly represented his enemies, the Frenchmen, as cringing, emaciated and superstitious people, while an enormous sirloin of beef arrives, destined for the English inn as a symbol of British prosperity and superiority.
Other Later works
Notable Hogarth engravings in the 1740s included The Enraged Musician (1741), the six prints of Marriage à-la-mode (1745; executed by French artists under Hogarth's inspection), The Stage Coach or The Country Inn Yard (1747),
In 1745 Hogarth painted a self-portrait with his dog (now also in Tate Britain), which shows him as a learned artist supported by volumes of Shakespeare, Milton and Swift.
Others were his satire on canvassing in his Election series (1755–1758);
Writing
Hogarth also wrote and published his ideas of artistic design in his book The Analysis of Beauty (1753).
Analysis
Painter and engraver of modern moral subjects
Hogarth lived in an age when artwork became increasingly commercialized and viewed in shop windows, taverns and public buildings and sold in printshops. Therefore, by that time, Hogarth hit on a new idea: "painting and engraving modern moral subjects ...
He drew from the highly moralizing Protestant tradition of Dutch genre painting, and the very vigorous satirical traditions of the English broadsheet and other types of popular print. In England the fine arts had little comedy in them before Hogarth.
Parodic borrowings from the Old Masters
When analyzing the work of the artist as a whole, Ronald Paulson, the modern authority on Hogarth, sees an accomplished parodist at work, and a subversive. 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. Hogarth also rejected Lord Shaftesbury's then current ideal of the classical Greek male in favor of the living, breathing female.
Influence
His satirical engravings are often considered an important ancestor of the comic strip.
Igor Stravinsky's opera The Rake's Progress, with libretto by W. Auden, was inspired by Hogarth's series of paintings of that title
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