William Hogarth

William Hogarth (born November 10, 1697, London, England—died October 26, 1764, London) was 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,1733). 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 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—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.

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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.