Happy 318th Birthday, Hogarth

William Hogarth, one of London’s most beloved artists, spent his later years in Chiswick (pronounced Chizzick), the area of London where my family and I are living now.

There is a statue of Hogarth on the Chiswick High Street not far from our house.  November 10th was his birthday.

He is clearly Chiswick’s favorite 18th century celebrity.

Hogarth is another artist who seems like six or eight people compressed into one. In addition to being a very successful portrait painter, he was an engraver, publisher, caricaturist, satirist, social reformer, foster parent, storyteller, and writer. He also put through the first copyright legislation and was a founding Governor of the Foundling Hospital.

A few weeks ago I took a tour of Hogarth House in Chiswick, where Hogarth and his family lived from 1749 onward (Hogarth and his wife had no children of their own, but they fostered foundlings) and which is now a museum.  Hogarth bought the house as a quiet country escape from the hectic center of London where he had lived and worked until then. Now the house sits on a busy thoroughfare.

Hogarth was able to make a good income from his artwork. He was commissioned for portraits and sold paintings as well as engravings and etchings based on his paintings.

 

Hogarth is best known for his serial works that mix moralist tales with social commentary and wit. He was keenly observant of human behavior in all it’s embarrassing and entertaining detail. He dealt with topical subjects like politics as well as perennials like sex, crime, cruelty, corruption and hypocrisy. He must have been a somewhat uncomfortable person to be introduced to. He would have had a ball with the latest American presidential debates.

A Harlot’s Progress (1731) and A Rake’s Progress (1735) are two of his most famous sequential series. Both tales depict the sorry end that can come from being deceitful, vain, selfish, greedy, lustful, and foolish. And from hanging with the wrong crowd.

Hogarth is a master at portraying facial expressions. In the detail from A Harlot’s Progress plate 6 below, the clergyman is feeling up the skirt of the woman next to him at the Harlot’s funeral. She doesn’t seem to mind.

Every millimeter of space in Hogarth’s pictures include details that reinforce the story being told. Below is a bit from the border of the final scene in A Rake’s Progress. The setting is an insane asylum, evidenced by the fact that an inmate has used the leather from a bible to mend a shoe.

Strolling Actresses In A Barn (1738) is flush with activity from all corners. Two neglected impish youngsters in devil costumes are fighting over their mother’s tankard of ale while she poses and loses her knickers.

Elaborate details like these remind me of images I loved from the early Mad Magazine comics (that I wrote about here before). William M Gaines and Will Elder must have been influenced by Hogarth. He is the great-great-great-grandfather of modern comic strip cartoonists.

But Hogarth wasn’t only interested in showing the foibles and flaws of society. He also wrote and published a book The Analysis of Beauty (1753), to share with both artists and commoners alike what he saw as the six principles of aesthetics: fitness, variety, regularity, simplicity, intricacy and quantity.

Hogarth died in Chiswick in 1764 and is buried in a nearby churchyard. I’m grateful to be able to see London through his eyes. The city has changed considerably, but humanity hasn’t so much.