Reputation and success of William Hogarth

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 (1733/34) 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 (1736) and The Good Samaritan (1737). 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 à 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 Mourning over the Heart of Guiscardo (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 Tailpiece, 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.