Hogarth, William

born Nov. 10, 1697, London, Eng.

died Oct. 26, 1764, London

British painter and engraver.

Apprenticed at 15 to a silversmith, he opened his own engraving and printing shop at 22. He took private drawing lessons while earning a living as an engraver of book illustrations. His first major work, the satirical engraving Masquerades and Operas, attacked contemporary taste and questioned the art establishment, thus winning him many enemies. In 1728 he embarked on a painting career with a work that reveals his interest in theatre and comic subject matter, A Scene from "The Beggar's Opera"; he also painted "conversation pieces" (informal group portraits) for wealthy clients. His engravings of modern morality subjects, often in sequential sets, were aimed at a wide public, and their outstanding success established his financial independence. To safeguard his livelihood against pirated editions, he fought for legislation protecting artists' copyright. Britain's first copyright act was passed in 1735, the year he published his satirical eight-part series The Rake's Progress. His other satirical series include A Harlot's Progress (1730–31) and Marriage à la Mode (1743–45). The teaching academy he established led to the founding of the Royal Academy (1768).

The Painter and His Pug, self-portrait by William Hogarth, oil on ...

Courtesy of the trustees of the Tate Gallery, London

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▪ English artist

Introduction

born Nov. 10, 1697, London

died Oct. 26, 1764, London

 the first great English-born artist to attract admiration abroad, best known for his moral and satirical engravings (engraving) and paintings (painting)—e.g., A Rake's Progress (eight scenes, begun 1732). His attempts to build a reputation as a history painter and portraitist, however, met with financial disappointment, and his aesthetic theories had more influence in Romantic literature (Romanticism) than in painting.

Youth and early career

      Hogarth—the only son of Richard Hogarth, a minor classical scholar and schoolmaster—grew up with two sisters, Mary and Ann, in the heart of the teeming city (London). Richard's evident abilities as a classicist brought him scant reward but provided an educated and industrious, if not prosperous, home. Later, looking back on this period, Hogarth dwelt almost exclusively on his father's shabby treatment at the hands of printers, booksellers, and wealthy patrons. Apart from confirming his distrust of learning, his resentment at his father's disappointing experiences fostered the boy's self-assertiveness and independence of character.

      As a boy with little inclination to scholarship but gifted with a lively perception of the world around him, he enjoyed mimicking and drawing characters, interests that were encouraged by visits to a local painter's workshop. While not discouraging his artistic inclinations, his father, Hogarth later complained, could do little more “than put me in a way of shifting for myself.” He consequently sought the security of a solid craftsman's training and became apprenticed, at about the age of 15, to a silversmith. Hogarth presumably moved to his master's house, where he learned to engrave gold and silver work with armorial designs (heraldry)—in his own phrase, the “monsters of heraldry.” Valuable years lost on what the engraver George Vertue (Vertue, George) aptly termed “low-shrubb instructions” had crucial bearing on Hogarth's subsequent development. Apart from the insecurity they bred, Hogarth's frustration with his training led him to exploit unorthodox methods of self-instruction in order to make up for lost time. His originality and flexibility as an artist owed much to this pragmatic and unconventional approach to his career.

      Hogarth's years of apprenticeship were by no means devoted exclusively to hard work, however. Sociable and fond of fun, a keen and humorous observer of human behaviour, with a special love of the theatre and shows of all kinds, he was evidently a convivial companion. Never prudish, he knew the exuberant life of the London streets, bawdy houses, fairs, and theatres firsthand and derived from them a fertile appreciation of the vitality of popular tradition. At the same time, he felt drawn to the coffeehouses and taverns frequented by writers, musicians, actors, and liberal professionals, forming lasting friendships in such lively intellectual circles. His sympathies rested with the middle classes and, specifically, with the critical, enlightened element—rational, tolerant, and humanitarian—that played such a prominent role in the cultural life of Hanoverian (Hanover, House of) England.

       George I had been king for six years when Hogarth set up shop on his own at the age of 23, resolving to escape the rigid limitations of his trade. He began by attending a private drawing school in St. Martin's Lane, where he joined other students drawing from casts and live models. He had a natural distaste for copying, however, likening it to emptying water from one vessel into another, and this instinctive rejection of formal training, combined with a natural waywardness, convinced him that the best method of learning to draw lay in direct attention to actual life. An intuitive realist (realism), primarily concerned with expressive rather than formal values, he developed a kind of visual mnemonics: “the retaining in my minds eye without drawing on the spot whatever I wanted to imitate.” From close observation of the everyday scene, Hogarth trained his unusual visual memory until he could dispense with preliminary studies, committing his ideas directly to paper or canvas. This inspired improvisation was supplemented by a formidable knowledge of the European tradition in art, acquired through familiarity with a vast range of reproductive engravings. Meanwhile, he earned his living as a copper engraver, executing trade cards, tickets, and book illustrations. His growing success as an illustrator brought Hogarth little satisfaction, for it entailed unwelcome dependence on the booksellers who had exploited his father; he later insisted that engraving “did little more than maintain myself in the usual gaities of life but (was) in all a punctual paymaster.” He had long been an admirer of Sir James Thornhill (Thornhill, Sir James)'s fluent adaptation of the late Baroque style (painting, Western), and in 1724 he joined a drawing school, newly opened in Thornhill's house. It was the start of a critical association. Holding the official post of sergeant painter to the king and being the first knighted English-born artist, Thornhill in his career affirmed the vitality of native art and the social respectability of the artist. Hogarth cared passionately about both, primarily for personal reasons but also because he believed in art as a vital creative force in society. He despised the connoisseurs' exclusive admiration for the Old Masters and their prejudice in favour of foreign artists. In his first major work, Masquerades and Operas, published independently of the booksellers in 1724, Hogarth attacked contemporary taste and expressed attitudes that were vigorously sustained throughout his life. Boldly questioning the standards of a powerful clique that was supported by the 3rd earl of Burlington (Burlington, Richard Boyle, 3rd earl of), an influential art patron and architect, Hogarth's first blow with the connoisseurs was shrewdly designed to appeal to his hero, Thornhill, who was himself suffering from Burlington's Neoclassical revival. Thus, Hogarth made powerful enemies at the start of his career, and, when they retaliated about 1730 by nullifying royal interest in his work, he was cruelly disappointed. Indeed, despite his own intransigent frankness, Hogarth was always discouraged and offended when his opponents hit back.

      A lawsuit he brought in 1728 against Joshua Morris, a tapestry weaver, throws eloquent light on his susceptibilities. The details of the case reveal that, by the age of 30, Hogarth felt sufficiently confident of his abilities to embark on a painting career. Morris failed to share this confidence and rejected a painting he had ordered on grounds that it was not finished. Hogarth indignantly sought and obtained public vindication with the help of professional witnesses, including Thornhill. Their testimony was amply justified by his first dated painting, The Beggar's Opera (1728), a scene from John Gay (Gay, John)'s popular farce, which emphasized Hogarth's prevailing interests: his involvement with the theatre and with down-to-earth, comic subjects. Closely attentive to realistic detail, he recorded the scene exactly as it appeared to the audience and included portraits of the principal actors and spectators. He thus anticipated both his later narrative paintings and the small, informal group portraits, or “conversation pieces,” that occupied him in the years immediately after this auspicious debut.

Reputation and success

      Hogarth eloped in March 1729 with Thornhill's daughter Jane. The marriage proved stable and contented, though childless. A few months later Vertue remarked on his public success with “conversations,” and in the next few years these small paintings, which acknowledged a great debt to the early 18th-century painter Antoine Watteau (Watteau, Antoine) and the elegance of French Rococo art (Rococo style), brought Hogarth an appreciative and wealthy clientele. Though he displayed remarkable energy at the time, Hogarth quickly tired of these little works, which involved numerous portraits for relatively poor remuneration. For his own enjoyment he began to record humorous scenes from everyday life. The crowded canvas of Southwark Fair (1733) captures the noisy and exuberant vigour of a popular festival and shows Hogarth feeling his way toward a completely new kind of narrative art based on vivid appreciation of contemporary life. Friends he made in the theatrical world, the actor-manager David Garrick (Garrick, David) and writer Henry Fielding (Fielding, Henry), shared his enthusiasm for honest naturalism in art. Like his great predecessor, the 16th-century Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder (Bruegel, Pieter, the Elder), Hogarth wanted to extract entertaining and instructive incidents from life. In telling the story of a young country girl's corruption in London and her consequent miseries, he not only ridiculed the viciousness and follies of society but painted an obvious moral. The engravings were aimed at a wide public, and their tremendous success immediately established Hogarth's financial and artistic independence. He was henceforth free, unlike most of his colleagues, to follow his own creative inclinations. To safeguard his livelihood from unscrupulously pirated editions, he fought to obtain legislation protecting artist's copyright and held back the eight-part Rake's Progress until a law of that nature, known as the Hogarth Act, was passed in 1735. In the following year Hogarth moved into the house in Leicester Fields that he was to occupy until his death.

Historical and portrait painting

      After Thornhill's death, in 1734, Hogarth reestablished his drawing school on a cooperative basis, and it became an important arena for artistic discussion and experiment. In 1735, in line with the humanitarian concern that occupied enlightened opinion of the day, he was elected a governor of St. Bartholomew's Hospital, and he seized this opportunity to decorate the main staircase with two large religious works, Pool of Bethesda and The Good Samaritan. In abandoning comic narrative and genre for history painting, he was generally held to have overreached himself, however, and modern critics have tended to endorse this opinion.

      About 1740 he turned once again to painting portraits, chiefly of middle-class sitters. He derived special enjoyment from painting the full-length, seated portrait of his friend, the philanthropist Captain Thomas Coram—a compelling and deeply sympathetic image that injected the dead aristocratic tradition with forthright realism and carried far-reaching implications for European portraiture. Hogarth, well aware of its importance, judiciously placed it on semipublic display at the Foundling Hospital, a benevolent institution for orphan children established by Coram in 1739. From the start Hogarth played an active role in the affairs of this charitable venture, and when the buildings were completed in 1745 he persuaded a group of fellow artists to join him in contributing paintings as edifying decoration. Their cooperative effort produced the first public exhibition of contemporary art in England and was a vital step toward the foundation of the Royal Academy in 1768.

 The famous self-portrait of 1745, a year that marked, in many ways, the high point of Hogarth's career, was also an artistic manifesto (see illustration—>). He mischievously juxtaposed his own blunt and intelligent features with those of his sturdy pug dog, Trump, and placed volumes of the great English writers William Shakespeare, John Milton, and Jonathan Swift beside a palette inscribed with the sinuous “line of beauty,” his shorthand symbol for the variety, intricacy, and expressiveness of Nature. In the same year he published the long-announced prints of Marriage à la Mode (see ), censuring the marriage customs of the upper classes, for which he had completed the paintings in May 1743.

Return to prints

      Apart from a gratifying commission for a large history piece, which he won from the lawyers of Lincoln's Inn (one of the four legal societies and schools in London), Hogarth concentrated for the next few years on simple, didactic prints executed from drawings, not paintings, and aimed at an unrefined public. Beer Street, Gin Lane, and Four Stages of Cruelty (1751) he cut deliberately crudely on wood blocks to make them cheaper and facilitate a wide distribution. Industry and Idleness (1747) contains, in addition to its obvious moral message, a good deal of self-dramatization, depicting the virtuous apprentice made good in a hostile world. In these years Hogarth's uncertainty and frustration expressed themselves in a number of unfinished paintings. In several spontaneous sketches, succeeding where he had failed in his heroic pictures, he synthesized dynamic elements of the 17th-century Baroque style with an uncompromising realism and fully expressive handling of the paint. These sketches were ignored in his lifetime, and it was only in the wake of the 19th-century Impressionist movement (Impressionism) that such sketches received serious attention.

      In 1745 and again in 1751 Hogarth organized auctions of his work. Both fetched extremely low prices, and Hogarth, in anger and mortification, retreated into aggrieved isolation, pursuing his philanthropic interests but adopting, in public, a defiant and defensive pose that involved him in increasingly rancorous debate on artistic matters. He expounded his own theories in The Analysis of Beauty (1753), combining practical advice on painting with criticism of the art establishment. He expressed his belief in the “beauty of a composed intricacy of form,” which “leads the eye a kind of chace” and advocated variety, irregularity, movement, and exaggeration in the interests of greater expressiveness. Though his ideas were respectfully received, especially on the Continent, the book inspired much adverse comment from his opponents.

      His large Election series (1754–58), painted with elaborate care, was a last attempt to prove the dignity of “comic history painting,” and thereafter he painted little of importance. His appointment as sergeant painter to George III, contrived in 1757, revived some interest in portraiture, but his last years, when he probably suffered considerable ill health, were dominated by the acrimony induced by a patron's rejection of his painting Sigismunda (1759) and the outraged public opinion over his satiric political print The Times, I (1762).

      Obsessive to the last, a few months before his death he executed an engraving sardonically titled Tail-Piece, or The Bathos, in which he sombrely depicted the demise of his own artistic world. In a sense it was prophetic, for, as the 19th-century English painter John Constable (Constable, John) rightly remarked, “Hogarth has no school, nor has he ever been imitated with tolerable success.” His immediate influence had been more strongly felt in literature than in painting, and after his death it was significantly the Romantics, many of whose ideas Hogarth had anticipated, who first recognized his greatness. Though never neglected, Hogarth was chiefly remembered for his satiric engravings, and, as with that other lonely pioneer, the 19th-century painter J.M.W. Turner (Turner, J.M.W.), the implications of his work were better understood on the Continent than in England.

Susan Elizabeth Benenson Ed.

Additional Reading

William Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty with the Rejected Passages from the Manuscript Drafts and Autobiographical Notes, ed. by Joseph Burke (1955), including a critical essay on Hogarth's aesthetics; John Nichols, Biographical Ancecdotes of William Hogarth, 3rd ed., enlarged and corrected (1785, reissued 1971), a gossipy outline based partly on contemporary reminiscences; John Ireland, Hogarth Illustrated, 3rd ed., 3 vol. (1812), a commentary on the prints, with a tidied version of the Notes; Anecdotes of William Hogarth Written by Himself (1833, reprinted 1970), including a useful catalog of the prints; Austin Dobson, William Hogarth, new and enlarged ed. (1907), a reliable biography and an important bibliographical source; Stanley E. Read, A Bibliography of Hogarth Books and Studies, 1900–1940 (1941); Francis D. Klingender (ed.), Hogarth and English Caricature (1944), with valuable plates; Robert E. Moore, Hogarth's Literary Relationships (1948, reissued 1969); Adolf P. Oppé, The Drawings of William Hogarth (1948), a critical catalogue raisonné; Ronald B. Beckett, Hogarth (1949, reissued 1955), a study of the paintings; Ellis K. Waterhouse, Painting in Britain, 1530–1790, 4th ed. (1978), a useful summary of Hogarth and contemporary figures; Peter Quennell, Hogarth's Progress (1955, reprinted 1973), a light and chatty account; Frederick Antal, Hogarth and His Place in European Art (1962), a Marxist analysis of Hogarth's cultural milieu and sources; Ronald Paulson, Hogarth's Graphic Works, rev. ed., 2 vol. (1970), an excellent catalog, with an illuminating introduction and bibliography; see also Paulson's Hogarth: His Life, Art, and Times, 2 vol. (1971), and The Art of Hogarth (1975); Derek Jarrett, The Ingenious Mr. Hogarth (1976), by a Paulson adherent, but more readable; Jack Lindsay, Hogarth (1979); and David Bindman, Hogarth (1981), good general biographies.

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