A Harlot's Progress (1731–1732)
Paintings destroyed by fire in 1755; engravings survive
Six scenes following Moll Hackabout from country girl to death in poverty; his first moral series
Image: William Hogarth · CC0, Wikimedia Commons
Art
William Hogarth
1697–1764 · English
Rococo / Satirical art
William Hogarth was a London painter and engraver whose satirical "modern moral subjects" — narrative series such as A Rake's Progress and Marriage A-la-Mode — mocked the vices of Georgian society. Sold as popular prints, they made him famous and led to the first copyright law protecting artists. "Hogarthian" now describes scenes of teeming, squalid, comic urban life.
How to spot them
- ▸Sequential narrative series of 4–8 scenes charting a character's moral decline
- ▸Crowded London interiors and streets packed with satirical detail, pictures-within-pictures and punning signs
- ▸Engravings in black and white with caricatured faces: drunkards, quacks, fops, bawds and corrupt politicians
- ▸Quiz clue pattern: "modern moral subject", Gin Lane, pug dog Trump, Hogarth's Act, line of beauty
Key works
A Rake's Progress (1732–1734)
Sir John Soane's Museum, London
Eight scenes of Tom Rakewell's squandered inheritance, ending in Bedlam; inspired Stravinsky's opera
Image: Unknown · Public domain, Wikimedia Commons
Marriage A-la-Mode (c. 1743)
National Gallery, London
Six scenes of a loveless arranged marriage between an earl's son and a merchant's daughter
Image: William Hogarth · Public domain, Wikimedia Commons
Beer Street and Gin Lane (1751)
Prints (impressions in the British Museum and elsewhere)
Paired prints contrasting healthy beer-drinkers with gin-sodden ruin in St Giles; a baby falls from its mother's arms
Image: William Hogarth · Public domain, Wikimedia Commons
The Gate of Calais (O the Roast Beef of Old England) (1748)
Tate Britain, London
Anti-French satire of a huge side of beef carried past starving soldiers; Hogarth drew himself sketching at left
Image: William Hogarth · Public domain, Wikimedia Commons
The Painter and his Pug (1745)
Tate Britain, London
Self-portrait on a canvas propped on volumes of Shakespeare, Milton and Swift, beside his pug Trump and the 'line of beauty'
No free image available (likely still in copyright) · see it on Wikipedia
Quick-fire facts
- •He called his satirical narrative series "modern moral subjects".
- •The Engraving Copyright Act 1735, known as Hogarth's Act, was passed largely through his lobbying against print pirates.
- •In The Analysis of Beauty (1753) he championed the serpentine "line of beauty".
- •He married Jane Thornhill, daughter of the painter Sir James Thornhill, by elopement in 1729.
- •He was a founding governor of Thomas Coram's Foundling Hospital and painted a celebrated portrait of Captain Coram (1740).
- •He was arrested as a spy while sketching the fortifications at Calais in 1748, inspiring The Gate of Calais.
- •His country house in Chiswick, west London, is now the Hogarth's House museum.
- •Stravinsky's opera The Rake's Progress (1951), with a libretto by W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman, is based on his series.
Drill it — 10 cards
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Sources
- Tate — William Hogarth
- National Gallery, London — Marriage A-la-Mode (collection entries)
- Sir John Soane's Museum — A Rake's Progress