[In the following essay, Paulson discusses the autobiographical elements of Hogarth's work, manifested in various self-representations, as well as representations of his father, his wife, and his father-in-law, within his paintings.]

William Hogarth wrote an autobiography (or at least notes and drafts toward one) and he produced in his graphic works self-representations, including self-portraits. He wrote the autobiography in the early 1760's as an old man; he included self-representations in his paintings and prints from the 1720's onward.

The autobiographical notes were both public and private: they gave an official public account but they were never finished or published in Hogarth's lifetime. The notes fall into three stages of a narrative: youth, overcoming obstacles and exploiters; success, creating a new graphic form, the “modern moral subject,” and launching into sublime history painting; and in the 1750's-60's, jealousy, misunderstanding, and persecution, a return to the paranoid first stage of the narrative. The passages most rewritten—perhaps only because they came first—were those of his childhood, apprenticeship, and early manhood, running up to the success of his conversation pictures (1728-30) and of A Harlot's Progress (1732), his “modern moral subject,” something “not struck out before in any kingdom.”

In these notes there are three highlights: the first is the emphasis on his father, his shabby treatment at the hands of the booksellers, and his subsequent death (Hogarth implies it was the result of their treatment). Parallel with the fate of his father, Hogarth presents his own early experience with the printsellers who pirated his prints and stole his livelihood (until he succeeded in getting an engravers' copyright act passed in 1735); and his later experience in the 1750's-60's with patrons, politicians, and other artists that prompted him to write the autobiographical notes. The second emphasis falls on his problems as a young engraver: his late-coming to the art, his hatred of the “drudgery” of reproducing “the monsters of heraldry” on silverplate, and his escape from this profession into independent engraving and then painting—but also his steep and remarkable ascent from engraving to painting and the priority of the mode he invented. The third emphasis, a correlative of the second, is the stress he put on the need for both his “pleasures” and his “studies,” words he repeats over and over. “Pleasures” takes on quite a burden of meaning for Hogarth, all the way from dulce (as opposed to utile) to play (the “love of pursuit” he advocated as the basis of a reading of his prints and an important aspect of the Beautiful) and “idleness,” but in the polarities with “studies” it sums up the private aspect of his life in tension with the public, moral, didactic, and professional.

All three of these situations were embodied indirectly in his art. For example, the “monsters of heraldry” is only another term for the decorative high art that he constantly played off against forms of low or empirical reality. The dichotomy of “pleasures” and “studies” appears in his obsessive use of the Choice of Hercules (which is between Virtue and Pleasure) and comes to a focus in his series of 1748 called Industry and Idleness.

What we notice when we turn from Hogarth's written autobiography to his graphic self-representations is that while the first presents a self, William Hogarth, the second begins by presenting this self as other, and specifically as marginalized other—a figure that may recall the story of his father and of his own early years. As soon as he started to paint, in his conversation pictures of 1729-32, Hogarth introduced a dog—the pug who stands with his paws up on a chair, mimicking the dignified pose of the host, while creating a wrinkle in the carpet. The innocent questioning of a dog confronts a world of imposed human order: society, or (in conversation picture terms) the family. The dog's continued presence in Hogarth's conversations strongly suggests that this was intended as his signature—permitted, even perhaps encouraged by his sitters, who commissioned him expecting some touch of puggish liveliness. But one also wonders why, so early in his career, Hogarth includes himself, or an aspect of himself, however conventionalized, insistent though self-deprecating, in almost every picture.

In some conversations the pug is contrasted with the dog of the family Hogarth is painting. In one the pug worries a small wicker hamper, while the well-behaved spaniel of the household by contrast sits upright to join his master in admiring a work of art instead of nature. In another the pug growls opposite the family dog who has a bone on his prosperous plate. Finally, precisely this same pug appears in Hogarth's self-portrait of 1740 alongside his own face, which the dog's face clearly resembles.

There is of course a conventional aspect to this dog: I refer to the Dutch “Dissolute Family” scenes on the one hand and—closer to Hogarth's intention—Watteau's fêtes galantes on the other, for example, The Shepherds (Berlin), where the dog's “natural” pose clarifies the artist's attitude toward the idealized love of the human couple. The dog also, especially in the self-portrait, relates mockingly to the tradition of the art treatises that connected animals with the old masters: Michelangelo with a dragon, Leonardo with a lion, Titian with an ox—in Hogarth's case with connotations of down-to-earth common sense and an awareness of the resemblance to his own profile.

After a series of self-representations as other, at the peak of his career in the 1740's, Hogarth joins the dog with his own face in a “self-portrait”: and he accompanies the two doggish faces with an artist's palette inscribed with his contribution to aesthetic theory, the “Line of Beauty,” and with volumes labeled Shakespeare, Milton, and Swift. Like his ancestors the Puritan spiritual autobiographers, he defines himself in terms of others—not Christ or St. Paul, but Shakespeare and the pug. He is defining himself as he had Tom Rakewell define himself in Rake's Progress 3 where, in a brothel, Tom breaks the mirror, destroying his present self, and replaces it by cutting out the faces of all the Roman emperors hanging on the brothel wall except Nero. The juxtaposition of the English writers and the pug draws attention to Hogarth's need in these images to make himself both singular and exemplary; to emphasize both the spiritual and the animal in him and—what he regards as the same thing—in his art.

In other works, in particular Boys Peeping at Nature, the subscription ticket for his first “modern moral subject,” A Harlot's Progress, the dog's function is taken by a young satyr with the same connotations of satiric disrespect and animal hunger, or sexuality, and the same association with the artist, although these are here complemented—domesticated—into a kind of concordia discors by a more respectable putto who restrains his attempt to lift Nature's veil. This plate reminds us that in his conversation pictures Hogarth had also employed children to comment on the over-ordered society of their parents. Like the dog, they are the commentary of nature on culture.

In the huge history paintings Hogarth made for St. Bartholomew's Hospital in the late 1730's, the Christ at the Pool of Bethesda and the Good Samaritan are accompanied—down below, as the Samaritan's wounded man is accompanied by his wounded alter-ego, his dog—by three small reddish monochrome panels telling the story of the jongleur Rahere, the founder of St. Bartholomew's Hospital, in this way connecting divine charity with an even more human and outcast Samaritan. Rahere was a public entertainer who recounted tales of comic heroes, sang, tumbled, and led dancing bears, but he rose by way of his comic gift from humble origins and little education to be the favorite entertainer of King Henry II, and with his wealth he endowed the church and hospital.

Hogarth, whose childhood had been spent in the shadow of St. Bartholomew's, and who by this time was a successful artist and a governor of the hospital, suggests the parallel to his own career of painting comic histories, which had now ascended to this large gift of charity in the form of the most exalted painterly genre. And while he painted the public message of Charity, his own and his age's primary virtue, depicted larger than life above, he adds his personal message, in monochrome, self-deprecating but at the same time self-assertive, below: the human version of the divine Charity in The Pool of Bethesda. And the two stories are connected by the figure of a dog leaning over from the upper to peer down at the lower.

But there is a further subtext in these sublime histories. The positive subject of Charity (human and divine, the Good Samaritan and Christ) evokes the negative subject of the Pharisees' pursuance of the letter rather than the spirit of the Old Testament law. Characteristically, Hogarth connects the subject of religion with another, for him cognate, subject of the English artist (“William Hogarth Anglus pinxit,” as he signed one painting), in which the biblical law equals the rules imposed on him by academic and usually foreign art critics. The references to Pharisaic law in both of the stories he illustrates make a comment on the rules of high art as well as on those of religion and society, emphasized by the commentary of the Rahere panels. The paintings say something in favor of the artist-Samaritan, the painter as well as his subject, who refuses to follow blindly the rules of the art treatises or of patrons—and is an outcast, always an outcast. One such rule is that a painter of drolls, the Rahere of painters, does not attempt the highest genre, history painting, as Hogarth is doing in these paintings. The singular and the exemplary are conjoined: this is only Hogarth, while at the same time Hogarth wants the figure to be exemplary for other English artists. These paintings are supposed to show them how to paint in England in the 1730's; the story of the Samaritan and the priests is to show them how to avoid the rules-bound theorists of academic art.

The exemplary self-image continues from the self-portrait with Shakespeare, Milton, and Swift: Hogarth also links himself with contemporaries with whom he wishes to associate himself—primarily Fielding, but also Garrick, Sterne, and others. For example, near the bottom (or source?) of the cloud of character-heads in Characters and Caricaturas he places his own face grinning at Fielding's—and below this, in words, a reference to Fielding's preface to Joseph Andrews, where the novelist associated his “comic epic in prose” with Hogarth's “comic history-painting.”

But there is also a paranoid fiction, the equivalent of his father's story, that runs through Hogarth's works. It becomes specifically autobiographical in The Gate of Calais, a nevertheless humorous scene based on an experience during a trip Hogarth made to the continent in 1748. The animus is against the French, who had arrested him for sketching (as they suspected) the fortifications of Calais: But the scenario and the composition establish the form of his less humorous paranoia in the 1750's-60's. There is the misunderstanding of his intentions; there is the tiny, almost obliterated, figure of the artist in the background at the left, marginal to the scene of folly but about to be unjustly imprisoned, however momentarily, for this misunderstanding. This was, of course, again the story of his father, the unjustly imprisoned.

The cause of his paranoid fictions was the attacks on him by his fellow artists that began when he opposed the plan for a national academy of art. It was important for them to discredit him, the most famous living English artist, if the plan was to succeed. And some of the attacks were grossly personal as well as professional. The basis of the latter—intensified after he wrote his aesthetic treatise—was the folly of the Rahere figure who aspires to history painting, the engraver who tries to paint becoming the painter who thinks he can write.

In his last years, when Hogarth had taken an equally unpopular position in politics, the paranoid fiction took the form of actually erasing his face from the self-portrait with his pug, replacing it with Charles Churchill's bearish physiognomy to indicate that in this world of the 1760's Hogarth and all he stood for had been replaced by this. Only the pug remains, showing the same puggish disrespect we saw in the conversation pictures. In his final print, The Tailpiece of 1764, his anticipated death (and the closing of the volume of his prints) coincided with the breaking of all serpentine continuities, all Lines of Beauty, all signs of his art, by the new fashion for the Sublime in theory (Burke), painting (Reynolds), and politics (Pitt).

But the paranoid fiction, masked or inverted, concealed or displaced, had begun to appear in Hogarth's first series, his first great success, A Harlot's Progress of 1732. Here is the ostensible pattern of an innocent girl from the country drawn into the ambience of the “great,” the fashionable, the respectable, in London; turning against her own nature she imitates this “greatness,” and comes to grief while the “great” themselves go their merry way. Her initials in Plate 3 are fleshed into “Moll [or Mary] Hackabout.” The Dictionary of Cant defines “Hacks or Hackneys” as “hirelings.” “Hackney-whores, Common Prostitutes. Hackney-Horses, to be let to any body,” but also “Hackney-Scriblers, Poor Hirelings, Mercenary Writers.” “Hack” links prostitute and bookseller and thus may contain a submerged memory of Richard Hogarth, or an inscription of Hogarth's own case with the printsellers.

The personal pattern is unmistakable. Besides the public facts found in newspapers about Col. Charteris, his rape of Anne Bond, and the rest, there was also Hogarth's father, who had come down to London and tried to live by London standards as a scholar and man of letters. The lad from the north country, attempting to be a Latin scholar and schoolmaster, ends as a literary hack, an inmate of debtors' prison, and dies, driven to his death by the exploitive London booksellers, as Hogarth recalled bitterly half a century later.

Equally relevant are Hogarth's own refusal to accept his status as a silver engraver's apprentice, his rejection of his indentures, his struggle to survive against the printsellers who pirated his early plates. Subscription, the method of distribution he inaugurated with the Harlot, was aimed against the mediation of the printseller (the equivalent of the harlot's bawd), a constant threat to his livelihood.

One wonders whether Hogarth read (though one can hardly doubt that he did) Defoe's preface to Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1720), where Defoe/Crusoe affirms of Robinson Crusoe “that the story, though allegorical, is also historical,” that is a “real history”: “All these reflections are just history of a state of forced confinement, which in my real history is represented by a confined retreat on an island; and it is as reasonable to represent one kind of imprisonment by another, as it is to represent anything that really exists by that which exists not.” One wonders if this aim—essentially the goal of self-discovery as the finding of the self by losing the self—explains the way Hogarth felt about the Harlot's Progress, the extent to which he rationalized the “allegory” of that history as his own. The story of the closed rooms he represented in these early “progresses” that are regresses suggests the representation of “one kind of imprisonment by another.”

No English artist painted more prison interiors than Hogarth. His first major painting was of Newgate and his second of the Fleet Prison. The first was The Beggar's Opera, where the prison was not a real one but a painted set on the stage of a theater; the second was of a real prison and the House of Commons committee that was investigating its cruelty and corruption. But with his first series of invented pictures, A Harlot's Progress, he abandons all sense of play. These show a room, which appears to be a drawing room or a boudoir, that is in reality a prison. The Harlot is literally imprisoned in Bridewell, but from the second to the final plate she is in spaces that are ever more closed and confining, and these are metaphorical equivalents for the confining choice she made in Plate 1.

In 1747, Hogarth published Industry and Idleness. Contemporaries who knew Hogarth or even his London-wide reputation would have perceived an obvious parallel between the industrious apprentice and Hogarth himself, who married his own “master's” daughter—Jane Thornhill, daughter of Sir James Thornhill, Serjeant Painter to the King—and succeeded to his business, carrying on history painting, reestablishing Thornhill's academy, and defending Thornhill's reputation as a painter. The question was the degree of the Hogarthian irony. Goodchild's face, with its handsome, bland, almost sheeplike features, is idealized almost to the point of caricature. One recalls the look of self-satisfaction on his face, the heartlessly academic poses he assumes, the affected manner in which he holds his teacup (perhaps trying to emulate the manners of the West End) in Plate 6. It may be significant that Hogarth originally called him William Goodchild but, thinking better of it, changed his name to Francis.

It is, however, Tom Idle's face that resembles Hogarth's own puggish, plebeian profile, which can be seen in The Gate of Calais, in his self-portrait of a few years later, or in Hogarth Painting the Comic Muse. If only to inject enough self-irony to make the portrayal palatable in his own mind, Hogarth must have introduced some sense of himself into his opposite: he was so unlike Idle, so like the industrious one. Yet one side of him clearly sought, as he put it, his “pleasure” as well as his “studies.” “Idleness” is one of the key words of his autobiographical notes. Looking back on his time as an apprentice, both in silver engraving and in painting at Vanderbank's academy, he emphasized his idleness, saying that he required a mnemonic technique “most suitable to my situation and idle disposition”; the system he developed and wrote about (a few lines on his thumbnail expanded, back in his studio, into full figures) allowed him “to make use of whatever my Idleness would suffer me to become possest of.”

It sounds very much as if there is a humorous self-portrait included in the portrait of the other, Tom Idle, hinting at that aspect of Hogarth that kept him from finishing his apprenticeship, liked to go wenching, was deluded by illusions of ease and grandeur, and, perhaps, unconsciously associated the creative act (as opposed to the successful businessman's practice) with guilt and public execution. Perhaps it was the Harlot (and also the Rake) in him that needed to be exorcised or at least accommodated.

The ballad “Jesse or the Happy Pair” being sung by a beggar at the lower left in Plate 6 leads the spectator, in a characteristically Hogarthian reading, to the memory of earlier apprentice-master relationships that also involved the master's daughter. The “Happy Pair” refers to Goodchild and his master (“West and Goodchild” on the shop sign) as well as to Goodchild and his bride, the master's daughter. There appears to have been no such ballad, but what one remembers of the biblical Jesse is his genealogy (given twice in the Old Testament) and his son David, who married Michal, his master's daughter. Out of this marriage a distinguished tree was to grow—the Tree of Jesse, the outcome of which was Jesus himself (Isaiah 11.1-4).

But Goodchild and David were both “apprentices”: David, originally engaged in a lowly capacity as harper to King Saul, becomes his master's close companion, best friend to his son Jonathan, and lover of his daughter (in each case a “happy pair”), and finally “takes over the business” as king of Israel. Saul's anxiety over the fact that David is destined to replace him as king led to attempts on David's life and to his own eventual ruin. To secure Michal's hand David was required to slaughter a hundred Philistines for Saul, to impress whom he doubled the number. Shortly thereafter, Michal saved him from the assassins her father had sent to kill him (1 Samuel 19.11-27). Saul in fact forced her to marry another, and David only reclaimed her after Saul's death (1 Samuel 25.44; 2 Samuel 3.13-16).

If the story of his childhood in debtors' prison was one plot or myth Hogarth could not help retelling, another was the story of the boy who is adopted by a second father, presented with his dazzling daughter, and then denied her because he has not lived up to expectations (or, in Industry and Idleness not denied her—but then he has split himself into the apprentice who gets her and the other who does not). He does not write in his autobiographical notes about his marriage to the daughter of Sir James Thornhill, but this private life is precisely what he takes up in his paintings: his relationship to his wife Jane and to his father-in-law, and perhaps (by implication) to other women as well. This becomes the self-representation of his “modern moral subject” following the Harlot's Progress.

George Vertue, the contemporary engraver whose diary records much of Hogarth's career, remarked that Hogarth had married Sir James Thornhill's daughter (this was in the spring of 1729) “without his consent,” and John Nichols, fifty years later, possibly from an independent account, envisaged an elopement. Thornhill may have been disturbed by the difference in their stations, but the age difference—he was 32, she at most 20—and Hogarth's probably too convivial years on the town may also have given Thornhill pause.

There is a reconciliation story (recounted by John Nichols) in which Lady Thornhill is supposed to have restored good feeling between the generations by advising Hogarth to place some of his Harlot's Progress paintings in his father-in-law's way. In this story it is the enterprising Jane, rather than Hogarth himself, who conveys his canvases to the Thornhill dining room, acting as a sort of mediator, and persuading her father to be reconciled.

Thornhill's disapproval of the marriage had to be reconciled with his obvious fondness for his young protégé. As to Jane Hogarth, we know little about her except that she was accustomed in later years to sail into the local parish church, very much the grande dame, and that she fiercely defended Hogarth's reputation long after his death. And there is one surviving letter from Hogarth to “Jenny,” from 1749, that demonstrates both his fondness (in writing at least) and the fact that she spent much time in their country house in Chiswick while he worked in the Leicester Square house in London. The fact is that whenever Hogarth turned to history painting based on a literary text he chose a story that dealt with a trio resembling Thornhill, Jane, and himself.

A decade after his wedding, and shortly after Thornhill's death, Hogarth painted A Scene from Shakespeare's “The Tempest”: He chose Act I, scene ii, the first meeting of Ferdinand and Miranda, which also includes Prospero, who serves to introduce the two parties and to hover over the scene as playwright-magician. Ferdinand, saved from shipwreck, recalls “Sitting on a bank, / Weeping again the king my father's wreck,” and he repeats more than once the paramount fact that his father has drowned (“my drown'd father,” “the king my father wreck'd”). Prospero has befriended him and now, in the scene Hogarth illustrates, introduces him to his daughter, with whom he immediately falls in love. The parallel is obvious. Hogarth's father had spent some years in prison and emerged a ruined man to die a few years later. Then Hogarth had met Thornhill and fallen under his spell—a spell we can recognize in the influence the older painter had on his assumptions about history painting of the sort being attempted in A Scene from “The Tempest.”

But having introduced the young couple, Prospero says, aside,

They are both in either's powers; but this swift business
I must uneasy make, lest too light winning
Make the prize light.

He therefore tests Ferdinand, accusing him of treason and attempting to turn him into another wood-toting Caliban. Ferdinand, outraged, draws his sword, which Prospero's magic prevents him from raising.

MIRANDA:
                                                            O dear father,
Make not too rash a trial of him, for
He's gentle and not fearful.

.....

PROSPERO:
                                                            Silence! one word more
Shall make me chide thee, if not hate thee. What!
An advocate for an imposter! hush!
Thou think'st there is no more such shapes as he,
Having seen but him and Caliban: foolish wench!
To the most of men this is a Caliban
And they to him are angels.
MIRANDA:
                                                            My affections
Are then most humble; I have no ambition
To see a goodlier man.

“Come on,” says Prospero; “Obey,” and of course Ferdinand does carry out such menial tasks for Prospero as gathering wood.

Miranda is the woman who has never seen a man, shown by Hogarth with her aged father Prospero behind her and a lamb nearby; and Hogarth gives her the colors of the Virgin Mary and a pose roughly like that of Mary at the Annunciation—crossed with Mary in a Nativity scene, thus relating Prospero to Joseph: a scene very like the parodic Annunciation used in the Harlot's Progress, 3 a few years earlier, applied to the Harlot as a failed Miranda.

This sounds like a witty private joke between Hogarth and his wife—though the fact that Thornhill had recently died might give one pause. Some of it sounds like a joke only Hogarth himself would have enjoyed. But the story was already present in his earliest finished painting, The Beggar's Opera (and a few years later in A Scene from “The Indian Emperor”). The plot convention parodied by Gay in The Beggar's Opera has the father-king imprisoning the hero because he is in love with the king's daughter. Captain Macheath's relationship to old Peachum is essentially the same, on a low level, as Montezuma's with the Inca or any of Dryden's rebellious tragic heroes with his king. Aspects of this fiction must have appealed to Hogarth in the years following 1728, when he had his own Polly and Mr. Peachum to contend with and was constructing his own “modern moral subject.” And he returned to it from time to time in the years to come. The question of course is: Did his interest in the story lead him to Jane or Jane (whom he would have known before January 1728 when The Beggar's Opera premiered) to the story?

The plot reappears in its most sinister form in the painting Satan, Sin, and Death, made around the same time as The Tempest, though it's safe to assume a bit later. As in the Tempest painting, Hogarth chooses the aspect of the Beggar's Opera painting that makes Polly a mediator (rather than the other aspect, or gestalt, of Macheath as Hercules at the Crossroads choosing between his two wives, Polly and Lucy), but in Satan, Sin, and Death Sin's face is turned toward her father-lover and away from her son-lover, and—subsidiary figures eliminated—the woman is now unambiguously the central figure. The context makes it clear that the father and the lover/son are fighting for the daughter. They are not only held apart by her but are contending for her favors. By emphasizing the triangular psychological relationship Hogarth has not only lifted the trapdoor on the conflicting instincts at work in Milton's scene, hitherto unnoticed by illustrators, but he has also exposed the deepest level of conflict in his Beggar's Opera and Tempest paintings, and in many of his other compositions.

The painting Sigismunda of 1759, the immediate cause of Hogarth's self-justification in his autobiographical notes, was an embarrassment from the start. There were stories about the posing of Jane Hogarth for Sigismunda and the bloodiness of Guiscardo's heart in the goblet, the object of her mourning or meditation. John Wilkes noted unkindly (after he and Hogarth had broken off their friendship) that it was Jane “in an agony of passion, but of what passion no connoisseur could guess,” and a housemaid of the Hogarths at Chiswick recalled that it was Jane grieving for her dead mother.

Hogarth cites Dryden's version of the story in his Fables. In this version, though not in any earlier one, Sigismunda and Guiscardo have not merely become lovers despite her father's disapproval, but have gotten married. That is, her crime is only marrying without her father's consent—marrying beneath her. It is a very hasty and perfunctory marriage ceremony followed immediately by their falling into bed. Secondly, Sigismunda stands up to Tancred; she is not frail, as she is in Boccaccio's version, but active. The parallel to Hogarth's own experience with Jane and Sir James Thornhill is all too precise.

Sigismunda's father Tancred selfishly sequesters her, but she falls in love with a young man

Of gentle blood, but one whose niggard fate
Had set him far below her high estate:
Guiscard his name was called, of blooming age,
Now squire to Tancred, and before his page.

Guiscardo is a young plebeian, raised up by Tancred to be his protégé, but when he discovers the youth has fallen in love with his daughter he forbids the match. Dryden recounts the story of their secret courtship under Tancred's eyes, how they steal away and are married, and how, after their marriage, they are discovered by the angry father, who kills Guiscardo and sends his heart in a goblet to Sigismunda; she fills the goblet with poison and drinks. Hogarth's persistent efforts to have the painting engraved, to show it to the public, and to sell it for an exorbitant price all suggest something of the deep personal feeling that accompanied it—exacerbated, of course, by Sir Richard Grosvenor's rejection of it (perhaps a memory of Sir James Thornhill's rejection of 1729) and by the adverse criticisms overheard at the Society of Artists exhibition of 1761, which caused him to withdraw the painting.

It may be significant that by this time Hogarth paints only the face and upper body of the woman, focusing on her face—her expression—and her hands. As he explained the painting in his autobiographical notes, he was responding to a head-and-shoulders painting attributed to Correggio, but in fact (as Hogarth sensed) by a minor follower. And here we have to ask once again: Did the “Correggio” lead him to choose the opportunity to challenge the old master, or was it the story of Sigismunda that caught his attention? The simple composition, dictated by the challenging of “Correggio,” is augmented, however, by a few symbolic objects. The heart of the lover in the goblet is balanced against Sigismunda's bracelet that bears the head of a king, apparently her father. (In his portrait of Jane he shows her holding an oval portrait of Sir James.)

There is a kind of transformational grammar in effect in Hogarth's imaginative works. Richard Hogarth is reconceived as a naive young woman trying to succeed in London. She in turn is transformed, in the Rake's Progress (1735), into a male figure, one who destroys his loved one as well as himself. But in the Rake a new figure appears, a good woman named Sarah Young, who attempts (albeit unsuccessfully) to redeem the Rake. She derives from the Polly Peachum in The Beggar's Opera paintings who tries (unsuccessfully, it should be noted) to mediate between her father and lover/husband. Sarah Young tries to mediate between Tom Rakewell and the outside world, paying his debts at one point and accompanying him to debtors' prison and Bedlam, in the last posing as a Mary-the-Mother of a Pietà in the Rake's final agonies.

This figure, we have to conclude, is either Jane Hogarth or simply “the wife,” as opposed to the Harlot, Hogarth himself, and all the rest. This version of the other is good, though undeniably oppressive, the Samaritan as opposed to the wounded man or his wounded dog, and she moves to the center of the picture. In his St. Bartholomew's Hospital paintings (which immediately followed the Rake in 1736) she is carried directly over into the figure of Christ (Christian Charity-Love mediating between God the Father and his fallen creation), ministering to a figure who distinctly resembles the unclothed Rakewell in Bedlam. Love as Charity is contrasted with the Eros of the nude courtesan who (presumably suffering from a venereal disease) is being thrust by her wealthy keeper ahead of the poor so she will be first into the pool.

I must pause to mention the fact that in Jonathan Richardson's book on Milton, published in 1734 and read to Hogarth's club of artists at Slaughter's Coffeehouse, Christ is presented as the “Mediator” between God and man. Also I must recall that Hogarth affixes the name of Athanasius to the wall of a madman's cell in Bedlam in Rake's Progress 8. William Whiston, also inscribed on the Bedlam wall, was notorious for his anti-Athanasian pamphlets. Given the presence of Rakewell and Sarah in the pose of Christ and Mary, Hogarth may be making an ironic reference back to Rakewell Senior (a heavy presence, though recently deceased, in Plate 1), suggesting a parodic Trinity of these three.

The argument concerning the Trinity was the most vexed of the religious controversies surrounding deism. The heretical views filled a complicated spectrum labeled Arian, Socianian, anti-Trinitarian, semi-Arian, Tritheist, and so on. Pantheism formulated three distinct gods; deism one God, with Christ a much lesser and relatively unimportant figure (though still a god), and so on. Arianism was attributed even to high-ranking churchmen like Archbishop Tillotson and John Sherlock. Milton, believing in the son as Mediator, was regarded by many as an Arian: In his own writings on the subject he pointed out that Christ himself had said there is only one God; and that if he were a mediator, “it cannot be explained how anyone can be a mediator to himself on his own behalf.”

In general all these unorthodox views held that the Holy Spirit and the Son were to be distinguished from the Supreme God and could not therefore be regarded as part of him and his omnipotence—three distinct spirits or independent minds, three different essences. Thus it is possible to see Hogarth, with his own private concerns, as he moved from the Rake's Progress into sublime history, developing a story of an omnipotent father, a son who maintains his separateness, and a spirit (female) that tries to join them; or, to take Richardson's thesis of Christ as mediator, a father, his mediating daughter, and a fallen, “low” (Rahere, pug, apprentice) son: in other words, a story about both separateness and undifferentiation; about the power and threat of the father; or about a second father who replaces, obliterates in some guilty sense, the first and real father; or about a “trinity” of separate elements, two opposed and the third attempting to mediate between them, all variants of the tension between division and union.

The figure of the woman, as mediator as well as sexual object, continues to appear in the prints about art that Hogarth published between 1736 and 1741 in which a pretty young woman (again in the pose of Polly, Miranda, or Sin) mediates between an artist and the threat of external disorder directly aimed at him by the chaotic external world. On the surface the pictures are about the beautiful woman as one form of nature (la belle nature). In The Distressed Poet and The Enraged Musician she is bridging the gap between the artist and intractable things-as-they-are: between an over-formalized artist, a poet or musician, and the subculture, underclass world of street noises, bill collectors, and hungry dogs. In the former she still carries New Testament associations, especially in the painting, in which she is in the color as well as pose of a Virgin Mary in a Nativity.

Parenthetically, we might note how the Christ child is projected in the story of “Jesse or the Happy Pair” as well as in the Nativity Scenes (Harlot 3, the Scene from “The Tempest,” as well as the Distressed Poet), and then recall the Hogarths' childlessness. In fact, the children who bore the name William and Jane Hogarth were in a sense miraculous children: they were foundlings. The orphans who were placed in London's Foundling Hospital were named after the governors, of which Hogarth was one, and there was always a William and Jane Hogarth in residence—and also, when the governors' and their wives' names were used up, a Tom Jones and Sophia Western, and so on into current fiction.

In any case, Hogarth presents a story—at least in his experiments in high art (his history paintings) and his prints about art and the artist—in which his wife Jane is the center of his world, the mediator between a poor foolish artist trying to find and impose order (trying to equal the old masters, and so on) and the threats of intractable experience, or perhaps between the father or the superego who imposes the ideal and the idle apprentice who violates it, or some such dichotomy. Either Jane has become the center of his imaginative world, or he has found a substitute for her (what he would have wanted her to be) in this figure: a Jane or a Jane-substitute.

There is another detail that has not been explained in Characters and Caricaturas: Fielding and Hogarth are grinning at each other, as if sharing a good joke. But Hogarth's head is attached to another, growing out of the back of his head, clearly indicated by the shading of his neck that joins the two faces into a Janus. No other face in the print is attached to another. This gently smiling face, the only female face shown, I take to be Jane's, and I do not doubt that Hogarth was playing on the words Jane-Janus. He is showing the other, gentler aspect of himself. For corroboration I have only the two surviving portraits of Jane, one certainly by Hogarth, the other—with the mouth of the face in Characters and Caricaturas—possibly by Sir James Thornhill.

The Janus-reference—seeing himself divided—returns us to the question of his self-representation: What does Hogarth, as a person of his time, see as the shape of a life? To judge by his “biographies” of a Harlot, Rake, and so on, he sees a life in terms of the Puritan model of conversion. But these “conversions” are parodies, not the replacement of our face by Christ's but its replacement by some fashionable model. And Hogarth did not see his own life in terms of a conversion. Rather, both his father's and his own life adapt the form, in the recounting, of a satire (or a sentimental satire), something between Juvenal's Third Satire and Mackenzie's Man of Feeling. The man of sensibility and originality is misunderstood, persecuted, and destroyed.

But then there is the other story of his split identities and the woman who tries to heal them. He seems to see himself, insofar as he allegorizes himself as the artist, with a profound ambivalence—as both Harlot-victim and Rake-destroyer/self-destroyer, as well as both industrious and idle apprentice. This is where the young woman fits in, trying to bridge in some way this antinomy. But when, as in Industry and Idleness, Hogarth has the courage to follow through, from the single plate showing mediation to the narrative account, his self-representation, beginning as bifurcation (into pleasures versus studies, industry versus idleness, order versus chaos) is then leveled out, undifferentiated until either pleasures join studies or industry is no longer distinguishable from idleness in terms of intentions, actions, or consequences.

A final example, from 1745, just after Characters and Caricaturas: The small etching called The Battle of the Pictures, which Hogarth used as a ticket for his sale of the paintings for his engravings, was an attempt to prove that his paintings were not merely modelli for his enormously popular engravings but art objects in themselves, fit to stand up against the old masters. For his ticket he adapts to art history Swift's Battle of the Books in which the moderns, materialized as their books, attack and are repulsed by the old folios of the ancients.

The question I want to ask about this print is why Hogarth chose to show two almost identical paintings, one above the other, in the lower center of the design. One is a Penitent Magdalen slashing into Harlot 3, and the other is a saint cutting into the pious old woman of Morning (the first of the Four Times of the Day). The saint is in a very similar pose, with similar altar, skull, and crucifix, perhaps merely at his devotions but parallel to the Magdalen, seemingly penitential. The first refers to the Harlot, a Magdalen who does not repent, and the second to the cold exclusive piety of the old woman, a contemporary version of a holy hermit.

The horizontal relationship between the contending ancient and modern paintings is clear enough, but the relationship is less clear between the vertical series of subjects and compositions. Hogarth never made such juxtapositions without a reason. These two canvases are placed below two scenes of revelry: a Feast of the Gods versus a brothel scene, and a bacchanal versus a drinking scene. They are scenes of revelry and penance, two and two, with the exception of the one pair of paintings that appear within the cutaway of Hogarth's house, where the painting of Marriage A-la-mode 2 is shown still on his easel (this series was not included in the sale). The opponent in this case is the Aldobrandini Marriage, sharing the subject of matrimony—the one not only antique but ideal; the other modern and a degeneration of that ideal. I suppose the other paintings could be said to represent a decline, as well as candid realism, in the modern as opposed to the ancient—if, that is, we take the classical gods and the Christian, in fact, Roman Catholic, saints to be ideals. There is the sense that these old paintings are no longer appropriate to be copied, though they remain—as they do in The Battle of the Pictures—models in terms of which the world of eighteenth-century London can be understood.

Off to the left, out of the contest between ancient and modern, are series of copies of other old master paintings: a Flaying of Marsyas (with, behind it, a row of St. Andrews and crosses) and a Rape of Europa. These must be regarded, in the context of other Hogarth prints, as emblems that inform the central action, the scene of combat. One Marsyas and one Rape of Europa are shown flying toward the fray. First there is the story of Marsyas, the underclass modern Hogarth, who challenges Apollo and is flayed for his impertinence (the opposite, by the way, of the emphasis in Pope's allusion to the story in his “Epistle to Arbuthnot” of 1735). The crucified St. Andrew offers a Christian version of the classical martyrdom. But why the Rape of Europa? Does Europa represent the continental tradition of art, the old masters, being carried away by Hogarth the bull, who is “raping” the ancients? That is the way he was seen by unsympathetic connoisseurs. Is the bull a larger version of the aggressive pug? Or is Hogarth perhaps also pairing himself and Jane in this print of 1745 as in the Characters and Caricaturas of 1743? If Europa is Jane, then the bull is once again the impatient William carrying her away from her father King Agenor—in this case by force and pursued by Agenor's son. There has been a strange sense in which Hogarth has seen his story in terms of—against the antique model of—the New Testament story of Christ, so why not set it against the story of the classical gods?

About all we can conclude is that something is being said, on some level, about Hogarth's painting and his marriage, both art and Jane, as well as about revelry and guilt accompanied by penance. And it is being said in a representation that is ostensibly only about art. The movement of Hogarth's imagination from this point on into the 1750's is relentlessly toward aesthetic theory, and the personal (“pleasures”) serves as the basis of his metaphor for his theory. But it is notable that the S-curve does not stand for self; Hogarth places his aesthetic theory, and its figure, in the other, in “Jane”; he projects his thoughts onto a woman. The ultimate end of his Beggar's Opera triangle of Macheath-Polly-Peachum is the diagram of the triangle on which is inscribed the serpentine line, Hogarth's “Line of Beauty,” on the title page of The Analysis of Beauty (1753). This figure schematizes the curves of the female body, has the head of a serpent, and is accompanied by an epitaph from Eve's fall in Paradise Lost. It “mediates” the three points of the triangle as it connects the opposing elements of architecture, decoration, pieces of furniture, and the successive positions of a dance. Within the illustrations accompanying The Analysis it is embodied in the figure of Venus or a beautiful contemporary woman, both involved in an adulterous triangle with a husband and lover.

I am not contending that Hogarth's subconscious drove him to produce these distinctive fictions, images, and finally this theory; or that they are predicated on the limitations of the discourses provided him by his society; but rather that Hogarth mythologized himself, his story, and in particular his marriage. First the story of his childhood, his father's failure and imprisonment, and then the story of his substitute father, that father's daughter, and their marriage, allowed him to chart the successful slide from the father down to the son through the mother-daughter, with his ambivalences expressed in the story of paternal opposition, rivalry, denial, and threat. It is quite possible to imagine him seeking out and selecting stories that in some sense validated or made public and respectable these elements of his personal life. He found public, accessible, ennobling (and enabling) equivalents in literature and history, and his paintings of them both drew upon and authorized his own experience.