sure sign of Hogarth’s skill that in a few carefully realized scenes he could reveal an astonishing amount about a character’s temperament, vices, social milieu, and fate.A Harlot’s Progress (1731-1732), for example, requires only six plates to follow a young country woman’s decline: from her arrival in town, which places her immediately in the hands of a bawdy woman; through several stages as an increasingly dependent, pathetic, and sickly prostitute; then finally to her funeral in a room filled with other prostitutes oblivious to the dismal lesson of her life. The moral intention may well have attracted many people to this work, although Hogarth is rarely “preachy,” and much of his satire presupposes a world that refuses to turn from its folly and wickedness. A Harlot’s Progress, though, instantly caught on for many reasons, not the least of which is that in it Hogarth expertly pictured a seedy but instantly recognizable part of London life and populated it with likenesses of real people who were currently infamous for their vices or crimes.

Because of its tremendous popularity, A Harlot’s Progress was not only imitated but also pirated, reproduced in editions that brought no profit to Hogarth or to his publisher. As a result, Hogarth delayed the publication of his next major work until the adoption of a parliamentary act in 1735 safeguarding at least minimal copyright protection for engravers. His active involvement in lobbying for this act illustrates his shrewd business sense and independence: Though he perhaps could have lived reasonably well supported by his wealthy patrons, he used these contacts to help devise and enact a law that would make such dependence unnecessary. His work in hand, The Rake’s Progress (1735), was not only an imaginative work of art but also a valuable property, and Hogarth was very careful about its marketing as well as its creation.

Analogous to A Harlot’s Progress, The Rake’s Progress follows a young man through a predictable, though dramatic, decline. Material success, Hogarth seems to suggest, is no substitute for humility and common decency: The Rake has all the advantages of wealth as he inherits an estate from his miserly father, but he wastes himself in a series of debaucheries, powerfully anatomized in eight engravings, that end not in death but in madness. Hogarth returned to the pattern of these two “progresses” later in his career: Marriage à la Mode (1745) shows the disintegration of an arranged marriage between two prideful and irresponsible people, and Industry and Idleness (1747) contrasts the fates of two men, one of whom prospers through hard work while the other wastes his time and ends up hanged as a criminal. As interesting and dramatic as these later works are, though, it is the earlier “progresses” that seem to embody fully Hogarth’s genius.

Hogarth’s first self-portrait, The Painter and His Pug (1745), pictures the artist at the height of his powers. His features are rounded and softened, his eyes stare straight at the viewer in a confident, even bold manner, and his mouth has a trace of a smile, suggesting both self-assurance and benevolence. The top half of his body, all that is pictured, rests on three books, labeled Swift, Shakespeare, and Milton, indicating not only the crucial literary influences in his life but also his particular aspiration to achieve their kind of success. The subjects in the foreground also define two of his main concerns: His dog at one side adds a comic, affectionate touch (animals, especially dogs, appear frequently in his works); at the other side is a palette, inscribed with a graceful S-curve, which he called the “Line of Beauty.” At this time in his life, from the 1740’s through the 1750’s, Hogarth had much about which to feel confident. His deep friendships with Fielding (who praised him in his novels) and the actor David Garrick were the source of much stimulation and support. He began to attract a group of followers, especially after he took over leadership of the art academy at St. Martin’s Lane when Thornhill died: Always a teacher, he not only directed this group but also worked on a treatise, The Analysis of Beauty (begun in 1745 and published in 1753), to explain his theoretical principles. His compassion as well as his creativity flourished, and even as he was extremely busy with painting and designing engravings, he continued to serve as governor of a foundling hospital.

The latter part of his life, though, was not so encouraging. Despite the tremendous popularity of his engravings, which went through numerous editions, he found himself increasingly isolated and, he believed, neglected. He was not offered commissions which he eagerly sought, and he repeatedly found that his call for a strong English style of painting resistant to stale classical techniques and subjects was not being heeded by a generation of artists who were moving toward the establishment of a Royal Academy of Art which would enfranchise much of what Hogarth despised: regulated artistic training based on what he believed would be unimaginative imitation of outmoded old masters. Hogarth’s appointment as Serjeant-Painter to the King in 1757 was not enough to bolster his spirits and in fact caused more trouble than anything else by leading him into a disagreeable confrontation with two satirists, John Wilkes and Charles Churchill, who attacked Hogarth’s defense of the Court interests. He spent the last years of his life, it seems, fighting losing battles, defending his politics and his theories of art, but perhaps more generally trying to keep at an arm’s length the assorted follies and evils he had satirized in his life’s work. A late self-portrait, The Artist Painting the Comic Muse (1758), shows him in the process of trying to capture his noble subject, but his body is angular, almost contorted, radiating intensity but no confidence. His last engraving is a vision of failure: Like the ending of Pope’s The Dunciad (1728-1743), where “Universal Darkness buries All,” and the end of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), where Gulliver is mad, The Bathos (1764) pictures the inefficacy of all human effort and the end of the world. At the time of his death on October 26, 1764, Hogarth may well have felt overwhelmed by the combined forces of decay he had so energetically contested.

Summary

William Hogarth is rightly regarded as one of the greatest comic artists, despite the fact that his works are filled with violent images and prideful, desperate, or otherwise ridiculous characters who are capable of great cruelty or stupidity and end their lives unhappily. Hogarth’s satire is, to say the least, barbed and serious, and his recurrent themes sound like an unrelenting indictment of a fallen world and an inveterately foolish species, man. Again and again, he presents stunning pictures of man’s dishonesty, preference for illusion over reality, pride, concern for material and sensual rather than moral comfort, and general unwillingness to be anything more than a beast to others. No one can feel confident that he or she escapes Hogarth’s penetrating, satiric gaze.

Where, then, is the comedy? Hogarth is often compared to William Shakespeare, but the essential correctness of this comparison appears only after a few important differences are noted. Hogarth does not often show a light comic touch. His characters are not often capable of redemption or change. Most important, he envisions no broad movement of comic reconciliation, as in the marriages that end Twelfth Night: Or, What You Will (c. 1600-1602) and As You Like It (c. 1599-1600). Hogarth failed to complement the dismal view presented in Marriage à la Mode: He planned but was never able to complete a sequence called “The Happy Marriage.”

There is more to comedy, though, than lightness and happy endings. Hogarth shares with Shakespeare a deep immersion in the physical world and the life of the body, displayed in abundant details. His pictures are filled with liveliness and energy, often misdirected, it is true, but perpetually intriguing. The actions portrayed are not always enviable—the suffering of a criminal or the posturing of fops at the pretentious soirée, for example—but they are always captivating. William Hazlitt, one of Hogarth’s great admirers, called this liveliness of subject and style “gusto,” and that term suits Hogarth perfectly.

Like the greatest comic and satiric artists, Hogarth had a basic willingness to acknowledge the ridiculous, and he did so without resorting to caricature: He broke through all proprieties to reveal basic, unclothed human traits, few of which are attractive. Through most of his career, he was not cynical but honest, concerned less with sympathy than with accuracy. At its best and most characteristic, Hogarth’s work is provocative and problematic, allied more closely with the comic interludes of Shakespeare’s tragedies and history plays than with his benevolent and hopeful comedies.

Bibliography

Antal, Frederick. Hogarth and His Place in European Art. New York: Basic Books, 1962. Extensive discussion of the contemporary contexts of Hogarth’s art, in England and abroad. Counters approaches that study Hogarth in limited and exclusively British settings.

Bindman, David. Hogarth. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981. A brief, reliable, well-illustrated introduction to Hogarth’s life and works. In contrast to most works, Bindman’s study emphasizes Hogarth’s achievement as a painter rather than an engraver.

Cowley, Robert L. S. Hogarth’s “Marriage à la Mode.” Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983. Lavishly illustrated study of one of Hogarth’s most important works. Includes a full background on the sources of this particular work, and detailed analysis, but also contains much commentary on other works by Hogarth.

Paulson, Ronald. Hogarth: His Life, Art, and Times. 2 vols. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1971, abridged 1974. Paulson’s two-volume work is the definitive critical biography, fully documented and illustrated. It is the starting place for serious work on Hogarth. General readers and students may prefer to consult the one-volume abridged version, less fully documented but still comprehensive.

Paulson, Ronald. Hogarth’s Graphic Works. 2 vols. Rev. Ed. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1970. An authoritative edition of Hogarth’s prints. Each plate is fully annotated with information about its subject and printing history.

Paulson, Ronald. Popular and Polite Art in the Age of Hogarth and Fielding. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979. A valuable study of the interaction of popular and “high” culture in eighteenth century art and literature. Hogarth provides one of Paulson’s best examples of how “low” art forms became modified by but also invigorated “higher” art forms.

Quennell, Peter. Hogarth’s Progress. New York: Viking Press, 1955. An accessible introduction to Hogarth’s life and works, aimed especially at the general reader. Useful and interesting, but not as detailed, reliable, or well illustrated as Paulson’s biography.

Shesgreen, Sean, ed. Engravings by Hogarth: 101 Prints. New York: Dover Publications, 1973. Full-size reproductions of many of Hogarth’s important plates. Includes a lengthy critical introduction, an annotated bibliography, and detailed commentary.