William Hogarth
(Encyclopaedia Britannica)
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 and paintings—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 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. 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 alively
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—in his own phrase, the “monsters of heraldry.” Valuable years
lost on what the engraver George Vertue 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 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, 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's fluent adaptation of the late Baroque style,
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, 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'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 and the elegance
of French Rococo art, 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 and writer Henry Fielding, shared his enthusiasm for honest
naturalism in art. Like his great predecessor, the 16th-century Flemish
painter Pieter Bruegel 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. 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 a la Mode, 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 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
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, the
implications of his work were better understood on the Continent than in
England.
Susan Elizabeth Benenson
