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(b London, 10 Nov 1697; d London, 25-26 Oct 1764). English painter and engraver. He played a crucial part in establishing an English school of painting, both through the quality of his painting and through campaigns to improve the status of the artist in England. He also demonstrated that artists could become independent of wealthy patrons by publishing engravings after their own paintings. He is best remembered for the satirical engravings that gave the name 'Hogarthian' to low-life scenes of the period.
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| Biography: William Hogarth |
William Hogarth (1697-1764), the most original painter of his age in England, invented a new species of dramatic painting and is one of the great masters of satire in engraving and painting.
William Hogarth was born in St. Bartholomew's Close, London, on Nov. 10, 1697, the son of a classical scholar who conducted a private school. In his draft for an autobiography Hogarth wrote that he was exceptionally fond of shows and spectacles as a child and that he excelled in mimicry. He left school at his own request in 1713 and was apprenticed to the silver-plate engraver and dealer in plate Ellis Gamble.
Hogarth disliked the drudgery of his apprenticeship and especially copying the designs of others. His ambition to become a history painter was fired by seeing the late baroque paintings in process of execution by Sir James Thornhill at St. Paul's Cathedral and Greenwich Hospital. During his apprenticeship Hogarth invented a system of visual mnemonics, a linear shorthand that enabled him to reconstruct figures and scenes which had arrested his attention.
When his father died in 1718, "disappointed by great men's promises" to subscribe to a projected Latin dictionary, Hogarth's family supported itself by going into trade, his younger sisters setting up a dress shop and he himself going into business as a tradesman-engraver in 1720, the year his apprenticeship expired. His early commissioned work consisted largely of shop cards, ornamental and heraldic designs for silver plate, and illustrations for books.
In 1720 Hogarth joined the St. Martin's Lane Academy, the decisive step in his training as a painter. In 1724 he published his first independent print, Masquerades and Operas, Burlington Gate, an attack on English subservience to foreign art. During this period of intense activity as an engraver, he laid the foundation for his remarkable knowledge of prints, including reproductions of the Old Masters.
By 1728 Hogarth was ready to make his debut as a painter, and he quickly established a reputation as a master of the conversation piece. The following year he eloped with Jane Thornhill, the daughter of his boyhood hero Sir James Thornhill. The turning point in Hogarth's career (it is said to have effected the reconciliation with his irate father-in-law) was the success of the Harlot's Progress prints in 1732. The idea originated in a single picture, to which he was urged to add a companion, a typical rococo conceit, but other ideas multiplied until he had told the story of a prostitute's downfall in six stages. The original paintings were destroyed by fire in 1755.
There were precedents for narrative series on similar themes in Italy and the Netherlands, but Hogarth's invention is distinguished by its strict attention to the model of the English tragicomedy of manners. Publication of his second series in dramatic form, the Rake's Progress, was delayed until 1735 so that his rights could be protected by the Copyright Act of the same year, commonly known as Hogarth's Act. His dramatic trilogy concluded with Marriage àla Mode, published in 1745.
Encouraged by his friend Henry Fielding, Hogarth next turned to moral satires that burlesqued baroque grand-manner painting; that is, he chose epic models rather than dramatic ones. The masterpiece of this group is the four prints of An Election Entertainment (1755-1758). He was now an acknowledged leader of his profession, and he led the agitation against proposals to found a royal academy on the French model.
Hogarth's opposition to an academy is intelligible in the light of his earlier efforts to raise the status of British art and free its practitioners from dependence on aristocratic patronage. In the 1730s he had been active in a scheme for decorating the pleasure resort of Vauxhall Gardens with contemporary paintings and sculpture, and in 1745 he followed this up with an even more ambitious project for the presentation of works by living artists to the Foundling Hospital, the first donors being largely recruited from the St. Martin's Lane Academy, which he had revived in 1735. Hogarth believed that if artists united to exhibit their works and especially to sell prints made from their paintings they would be able to resist the influence of the connoisseurs, against whom he waged a lifelong war.
Hogarth threw himself with equal energy into moral and humanitarian causes as a governor of St. Bartholomew's Hospital and a foundation governor of the Foundling Hospital, frequently joining forces with Fielding, for example, in an anti-gin campaign. Hogarth was particularly concerned with the welfare of the young of the laboring and artisan classes, for whom he designed the series Industry and Idleness (1747), and with the prevention of cruelty, the theme of the Four Stages of Cruelty (1751). At the same time he never relinquished his ambitions to become a religious painter in the grand manner, executing more monumental pictures for churches and public institutions than any other English artist between Thornhill and Benjamin West.
His narrative satires gained Hogarth a Continental reputation. His income was adequate to support a town house, a country home at Chiswick, and six servants. In 1757 he obtained the highest honor open to his profession: the appointment as sergeant painter to the king. He was at work on his last print, the Bathos, a mock-rococo counterpart to Albrecht Dürer's Melancolia, when he was taken ill and died at Leicester Fields on Oct. 25, 1764.
Further Reading
Hogarth's autobiographical writings are published from the original manuscripts in the standard edition of his esthetic treatise, The Analysis of Beauty, edited by Joseph Burke (1955). Ronald Paulson, Hogarth: His Life, Art, and Times (2 vols., 1971), is the definitive modern biography, and Paulson's monumental Hogarth's Graphic Works (2 vols., 1965) is the definitive edition of his engravings. In Joseph Burke and Colin Caldwell, Hogarth: The Complete Engravings (1968), the emphasis is esthetic, and paintings and drawings are included for comparative purposes. The drawings and paintings are covered respectively in two illustrated catalogs: A. P. Oppé, ed., The Drawings of William Hogarth (1948), and R. B. Beckett, Hogarth (1949).
Additional Sources
Gaunt, William, The world of William Hogarth, London: J. Cape, 1978.
Gowing, Lawrence, Hogarth, London Tate Gallery 1971.
Hogarth, William, The art of Hogarth, London: Phaidon; New York: distributed by Praeger Publishers, 1975.
Jarrett, Derek, The ingenious Mr. Hogarth, London: M. Joseph, 1976.
Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph, Lichtenberg's Commentaries on Hogarth's engravings, London, Cresset P., 196.
Lindsay, Jack, Hogarth: his art and his world, New York: Taplinger Pub. Co., 1979, 1977.
Paulson, Ronald, Hogarth, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991-c1993.
Paulson, Ronald, Hogarth: his life, art, and times, New Haven, published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art (London) by the Yale University Press, 1971.
Paulson, Ronald, Hogarth: his life, art, and times, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1974.
Rosenthal, Michael, Hogarth, London: Jupiter Books, 1980.
Webster, Mary, Hogarth, London: Studio Vista, 1979.
| British History: William Hogarth |
Hogarth, William (1697-1764). Artist. London-born, Hogarth set up as an illustrator, largely self-taught, before producing ‘conversation pieces’, engraving scenes of contemporary life, and history painting. Pugnacious, provocative, and a passionate believer that honest naturalism was preferable to the sterility of formal training, he suffered for his attempts to ridicule the deeply entrenched, Renaissance-based theories of good taste. Underrated as a painter, he is best remembered for his moral and satirical engravings (Rake's Progress, Marriage à la Mode, and Gin Lane).
| Columbia Encyclopedia: William Hogarth |
Bibliography
See his Analysis of Beauty, ed. by J. Burke (1955); his graphic works, ed. by R. Paulson (rev. ed. 1970); biographies by P. Quennell (1955), R. Paulson (1971), D. Bindman (1985), and J. Uglow (1997); studies by F. Antal (1962), G. C. Lichtenberg (tr. 1966), S. Shesgreen (1982), and L. S. Cowley (1988).
| History 1450-1789: William Hogarth |
Hogarth, William (1697–1764), English painter and engraver. Famous for his biting and satirical visual commentaries on urban life, William Hogarth had a particularly profound impact on the development of print culture, especially political cartoons and the modern comic strip.
Born in London to the schoolmaster Richard Hogarth and Anne Gibbons, Hogarth served an apprenticeship in 1713 to a silver-plate engraver before becoming an independent engraver in 1720. By this time he had also taken up painting, attending the academy in St. Martin's Lane. During the 1720s and 1730s, Hogarth emerged as an important portraitist, producing several impressive "conversation pieces"—small-scale informal group portraits of members of a family or friends in social gatherings—and a number of sensitive portraits of individual sitters. Hogarth, however, pursued his goal of history painting, achieving his first major success in 1729 with The Beggar's Opera, the representation of a scene from John Gay's popular satirical ballad opera. In his Biographical Anecdotes, Hogarth later explained that he conceived of his pictures as stages, and men and women his players, "who by means of certain actions and gestures, are to exhibit a dumb shew" (Hogarth, 1955, p. 209). It was, above all, with his so-called modern moral subjects that Hogarth developed his ideals of pictorial drama. In this innovative genre, Hogarth related moralizing tales drawn from contemporary life in a sequence of narrative paintings, which were subsequently engraved and circulated widely. Satirical in tone, these modern moral subjects offered tart critiques of virtually all social groups.
The first of these sequential narratives, A Harlot's Progress (1732), comprised six scenes that followed the misfortunes of a country girl in London. Scene two shows her dominating a Jewish lover, having adopted the flamboyant lifestyle of an aristocratic lady, complete with gossiping servants and a tea-bearing black servant. In subsequent scenes, the woman declines into prostitution and finally dies of syphilis. A similar trajectory can be witnessed in Hogarth's A Rake's Progress (1735), which tracks the fate of its spendthrift protagonist from inheritance to the madhouse. Hogarth's most lavish modern moral subject was, however, Marriage à la Mode (1745). This set of images—Hogarth's only series to take place completely indoors—comments directly on the evils that stem from greed and a continual quest for status. Scene four shows the consequences of a doomed arranged marriage. At a morning reception, the newly wed countess presides over a colorful group of hangerson, including a French hairdresser, who fusses with her hair, and an Italian castrato. Marriage à la Mode also addresses artistic taste by lampooning contemporary fashion for Continental finery, including baroque painting and Palladian architecture.
Hogarth set forth his thoughts on aesthetics systematically in his 1753 treatise The Analysis of Beauty. In this illustrated text, Hogarth drew on everyday life and often comic examples to argue that the judgment of beauty was not the prerogative of the connoisseur, whose pretensions he despised, but rather a set of qualities available to a wider public.
Hogarth's serious works offered fresh perspectives on the persistent social ills—substance abuse, poverty, and moral decay—that plagued life in eighteenth-century London. Operating within the lively paper culture that was transforming the early modern public sphere, Hogarth's successful pictorial dramas both reflected these ills and developed visual critiques of their causes. In so doing, Hogarth produced a socially, morally, and politically engaging art that addressed issues of class, gender, and race in an age of colonial expansion. The artist's skepticism left few unscathed; he ruthlessly poked fun at politicians (as in The Times, The Lottery, and The Election series), industrialists (The South Sea Scheme), clerics, the lower, middle, and upper classes. However, Hogarth also offered strikingly sympathetic representations of, for example, professional women: seamstresses, milkmaids, ballad-sellers, fish-girls, and actresses. His engaging Strolling Actresses Dressing in a Barn (1738), issued with the Four Times of Day print series, can be regarded as an icon of working-class women. His lucidly executed painting The Shrimp Girl (c. 1745; National Gallery, London) expresses the natural virtue of "common people" and, possibly, the nation. Hogarth's social didacticism emerged most strongly in his graphic series Industry and Idleness (1747) and the diptych Beer Street and Gin Lane (1751), which offer the viewer a rhetorical choice between good and evil.
Although one may recognize the moral thrust of Hogarth's works, it is difficult to align them with a single authorial voice. His work established a mode of British urban narrative marked by multiplicity, ambiguity, and trenchant humor.
Bibliography
Primary Sources
Hogarth, William. Autobiographical Notes (c. 1764). In The Analysis of Beauty. Edited by John Burke, pp. 201–236. Oxford, 1955.
Nichols, John. Biographical Anecdotes of William Hogarth and Catalogue of His Works Chronologically Arranged. London, 1781.
Secondary Sources
Bindman, David. Hogarth. London, 1981.
Dabydeen, David. Hogarth's Blacks: Images of Blacks in Eighteenth Century English Art. Kingston-upon-Thames, U.K., 1985.
Fort, Bernadette, and Angela Rosenthal, eds. The Other Hogarth: Aesthetics of Difference. Princeton, 2001.
Hallett, Mark. Hogarth. London, 2000.
Paulson, Ronald. Hogarth. 3 vols. New Brunswick, N.J., 1991–1993.
——. Hogarth's Graphic Works. 2 vols. 3rd ed. New Haven and London, 1989.
—ANGELA H. ROSENTHAL
| Quotes By: William Hogarth |
Quotes:
"All the world is competent to judge my pictures except those who are of my profession."
"You know I won't turn over a new leaf I am so obstinate, but then I am no less obstinate in being your affectionate Husband."
| Wikipedia: William Hogarth |
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| William Hogarth | |
|---|---|
 William Hogarth, self-portrait, 1745 |
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| Born | 10 November 1697 London, England |
| Died | 26 October 1764 (aged 66) London, England |
| Resting place | St. Nicholas's Churchyard, Chiswick Mall, Chiswick, London |
| Occupation | Painter, engraver, satirist |
| Spouse(s) | Jane Thornhill |
William Hogarth (10 November, 1697 – 26 October, 1764) was a major English painter, printmaker, pictorial satirist, social critic and editorial cartoonist who has been credited with pioneering western sequential art. His work ranged from realistic portraiture to comic strip-like series of pictures called "modern moral subjects". Much of his work poked fun at contemporary politics and customs; illustrations in such style are often referred to as "Hogarthian".
Contents |
William Hogarth was born at Bartholomew Close in London to Richard Hogarth, a poor Latin school teacher and textbook writer, and Anne Gibbons. In his youth he was apprenticed to the engraver Ellis Gamble in Leicester Fields, where he learned to engrave trade cards and similar products. Young Hogarth also took a lively interest in the street life of the metropolis and the London fairs, and amused himself by sketching the characters he saw. Around the same time, his father, who had opened an unsuccessful Latin-speaking coffee house at St John's Gate, was imprisoned for debt in Fleet Prison for five years. Hogarth never spoke of his father's imprisonment.
He became a member of the Rose and Crown Club, with Peter Tillemans, George Vertue, Michael Dahl, and other artists and connoisseurs.[1]
By April 1720 Hogarth was an engraver in his own right, at first engraving coats of arms, shop bills, and designing plates for booksellers.
In 1727, he was hired by Joshua Morris, a tapestry worker, to prepare a design for the Element of Earth. Morris, however, heard that he was "an engraver, and no painter", and consequently declined the work when completed. Hogarth accordingly sued him for the money in the Westminster Court, where the case was decided in his favour on 28 May 1728. In 1757 he was appointed Serjeant Painter to the King.
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. In the bottom left corner, he shows Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish figures gambling, while in the middle there is a huge machine, like a merry-go-round, which people are boarding. At the top is a goat, written below which is "Who'l Ride" and this shows the stupidity of people in following the crowd in buying stock in The South Sea Company, which spent more time issuing stock than anything else. The people are scattered around the picture with a real sense of disorder, which represented the confusion. The progress of the well dressed people towards the ride in the middle shows how foolish some people could be, which is not entirely their own fault.
Other early works include The Lottery (1724); The Mystery of Masonry brought to Light by the Gormogons (1724); A Just View of the British Stage (1724); some book illustrations; and the small print, Masquerades and Operas (1724). The latter is a satire on contemporary follies, such as the masquerades of the Swiss impresario John James Heidegger, the popular Italian opera singers, John Rich's pantomimes at Lincoln's Inn Fields, and the exaggerated popularity of Lord Burlington's protégé, the architect and painter William Kent. He continued that theme in 1727, with the Large Masquerade Ticket. In 1726 Hogarth prepared twelve large engravings for Samuel Butler's Hudibras. These he himself valued highly, and are among his best book illustrations.
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. high). 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 works 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). He may also have printed Burlington Gate (1731), evoked by Alexander Pope's Epistle to Lord Burlington, and defending Lord Chandos, who is therein satirized. This print gave great offence, and was suppressed (some modern authorities, however, no longer attribute this to Hogarth).
In 1731, he completed the earliest of the series of moral works which first gave him recognition as a great and original genius. This was A Harlot's Progress, first as paintings, (now lost), and then published as engravings. In its six scenes, the miserable fate of a country girl who began a prostitution career in town is traced out remorselessly from its starting point, the meeting of a bawd, to its shameful and degraded end, the whore's death of venereal disease and the following merciless funeral ceremony. 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. The original paintings of A Harlot's Progress were destroyed in the fire at Fonthill Abbey in 1755; A Rake's Progress is displayed in the gallery room at Sir John Soane's Museum, London.
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. This moralistic warning shows the miserable tragedy of an ill-considered marriage for money. This is regarded by many as his finest project, certainly the best piece of his serially-planned story cycles.
Marital ethics were the topic of much debate in 18th century Britain. Frequent marriages of convenience and their attendant unhappiness came in for particular criticism, with a variety of authors taking the view that love was a much sounder basis for marriage. 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. All the paintings were engraved and the series achieved wide circulation in print form. 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.
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), holes up "in a Garrett with a Common Prostitute" after turning highwayman (plate 7) and "executed at Tyburn" (plate 11). The idle apprentice is sent to the gallows by the industrious apprentice himself.
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 which showed the effects of drinking gin which, as a harder liquor, caused more problems for society. People are shown as healthy, happy and prosperous in Beer Street, while in Gin Lane they are scrawny, lazy and careless. The woman at the front of Gin Lane who lets her baby fall to its death, echoes the tale of Judith Dufour who strangled her baby so she could sell its clothes for gin money. The prints were published in support of what would become the Gin Act 1751.
Hogarth's friend, the magistrate Henry Fielding, may have enlisted Hogarth to help with propaganda for a Gin Act: Beer Street and Gin Lane were issued shortly after his work An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers, and Related Writings and addressed the same issues.
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. In the first picture there are scenes of torture of dogs, cats and other animals. In the second it shows one of the characters from the first painting, Tom Nero, has now become a coach driver, and his cruelty to his horse caused it to break its leg. In the third painting Tom is shown as a murderer, with the woman he killed lying on the ground, while in the fourth, titled Reward of Cruelty, the murderer is shown being dissected by scientists after his execution. Hogarth is thus using the series to say what will happen to people who carry on in this manner. This shows what crimes people were concerned with in this time, the method of execution, and the dissection reflects upon the 1752 Act of Parliament which had just being passed allowing for the dissection of executed criminals who had been convicted for murder. It shows his reaction against the cruel treatment of animals which he saw around him, that he wished could be stopped.
Hogarth was also a popular portrait painter. In 1746 he painted actor David Garrick as Richard III, for which he was paid £200, “which was more,” he wrote, “than any English artist ever received for a single portrait.” In the same year a sketch of Simon Fraser, 11th Lord Lovat, afterwards beheaded on Tower Hill, had an exceptional success. Hogarth's truthful, vivid full-length portrait of his friend, the philanthropic Captain Coram (1740; formerly Thomas Coram Foundation for Children, now Foundling Museum), and his unfinished oil sketch of The Shrimp Girl (National Gallery, London) may be called masterpieces of British painting.
During a long period of his life, Hogarth tried to achieve the status of history painter, but had no great success in this field.
Examples of his history pictures are The Pool of Bethesda and The Good Samaritan, executed in 1736–1737 for St Bartholomew's Hospital; Moses brought before Pharaoh's Daughter, painted for the Foundling Hospital (1747, formerly at the Thomas Coram Foundation for Children, now in the Foundling Museum); Paul before Felix (1748) at Lincoln's Inn; and his altarpiece for St. Mary Redcliffe, Bristol (1756).
The Gate of Calais (1748; now in Tate Britain) was produced soon after his return from a visit to France. 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. He was seized and carried to the governor, where he was forced to prove his vocation by producing several caricatures of the French; particularly a scene of the shore, with an immense piece of beef landing for the lion d'argent, the English inn at Calais, and several hungry friars following it. They were much diverted with his drawings, and dismissed him.
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. He claimed to have painted himself into the picture in the left corner sketching the gate, with a "soldier's hand upon my shoulder", running him in.[4]
Notable Hogarth engravings in the 1740s includeThe Enraged Musician (1741), the six prints of Marriage à-la-mode (1745; executed by French artists under Hogarth's inspection), and The Stage Coach or The Country Inn Yard (1747).
In 1745 Hogarth painted a self-portrait with his pug dog (now also in Tate Britain), which shows him as a learned artist supported by volumes of Shakespeare, Milton and Swift. In 1749, he represented the somewhat disorderly English troops on their March of the Guards to Finchley (formerly located in Thomas Coram Foundation for Children, now Foundling Museum).
Others were his ingenious Satire on False Perspective (1753); his satire on canvassing in his Election series (1755–1758; now in Sir John Soane's Museum); his ridicule of the English passion for cockfighting in The Cockpit (1759); his attack on Methodism in Credulity, Superstition, and Fanaticism (1762); his political anti-war satire in The Times, plate I (1762); and his pessimistic view of all things in Tailpiece, or The Bathos (1764).
Hogarth also wrote and published his ideas of artistic design in his book The Analysis of Beauty (1753).[5] In it, he professes to define the principles of beauty and grace which he, a real child of Rococo, saw realized in serpentine lines (the Line of Beauty).
Hogarth lived in an age when artwork became increasingly commercialized and viewed in shop windows, taverns and public buildings and sold in printshops. Old hierarchies broke down, and new forms began to flourish: the ballad opera, the bourgeois tragedy, and especially, a new form of fiction called the novel with which authors such as Henry Fielding had great success. Therefore, by that time, Hogarth hit on a new idea: "painting and engraving modern moral subjects ... to treat my subjects as a dramatic writer; my picture was my stage", as he himself remarked in his manuscript notes.
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. His prints were expensive, and remained so until early nineteenth-century reprints brought them to a wider audience.
When analysing the work of the artist as a whole, Ronald Paulson says, "In A Harlot's Progress, every single plate but one is based on Dürer's images of the story of the Virgin and the story of the Passion." In other works, he parodies Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper. 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. Thus, as a "comic history painter", he often poked fun at the old-fashioned, "beaten" subjects of religious art in his paintings and prints. Hogarth also rejected Lord Shaftesbury's then current ideal of the classical Greek male in favour of the living, breathing female. He said, "Who but a bigot, even to the antiques, will say that he has not seen faces and necks, hands and arms in living women, that even the Grecian Venus doth but coarsely imitate."
On 23 March 1729 Hogarth married Jane Thornhill, daughter of artist Sir James Thornhill.
Hogarth died in London on 26 October 1764 and was buried at St. Nicholas's Churchyard, Chiswick Mall, Chiswick, London. His friend, actor David Garrick, wrote the inscription on his tombstone.
Hogarth's work were a direct influence on John Collier, who was known as the "Lancashire Hogarth".[6]
Hogarth's paintings and prints have provided the subject matter for several other works. For example, Igor Stravinsky's opera The Rake's Progress, with libretto by W. H. Auden, was inspired by Hogarth's series of paintings of that title. Russell Banks' short story, "Indisposed," is a fictional account of Hogarth's infidelity as told from the viewpoint of his wife, Jane. Hogarth's engravings also inspired the BBC radio play "The Midnight House" by Jonathan Hall, based on the M.R. James ghost story "The Mezzotint" and first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2006.
Hogarth's House in Chiswick, West London, is now a museum; it abuts one of London's best known road junctions – the Hogarth Roundabout.
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