William Hogarth

William Hogarth (10 November 1697 – 26 October 1764) made his name as an English painter, engraver, satirist, cartoonist, and writer. His output covered both realistic portraiture and sequential picture series he called "modern moral subjects"—the best-known examples being *A Harlot's Progress*, *A Rake's Progress*, and *Marriage A-la-Mode*. So familiar did his style become that political cartoons in that vein are still labelled "Hogarthian".

He came into the world in the City of London, the son of a lower-middle-class family. As a young man he started an apprenticeship with an engraver but never finished it. His father’s fortunes were uneven; at one point the elder Hogarth was locked up for failing to pay his debts, an experience that likely sharpened the edge in William’s later paintings and prints.

French and Italian painting and engraving left their mark on him, but his own work leaned heavily toward satirical caricature—sometimes bawdy, often sexually frank—and sat alongside first-rate realistic portraiture. During his lifetime his prints were mass-produced and hugely popular, making him the most important English artist of his generation. The writer Charles Lamb said Hogarth’s images were like books, packed with "the teeming, fruitful, suggestive meaning of words. Other pictures we look at; his pictures we read."

**Early life**

Hogarth was born at Bartholomew Close in London. His father, Richard Hogarth, scraped by as a Latin teacher and textbook writer; his mother was Anne Gibbons. The boy was apprenticed to engraver Ellis Gamble in Leicester Fields, where he learned to cut trade cards and similar items.

Young Hogarth also kept a keen eye on London’s street life and its fairs, amusing himself by sketching the characters he saw. Around the same time, his father—who had tried running a Latin-speaking coffee house at St John’s Gate, without success—was locked up for debt in the Fleet Prison for five years. William never spoke of that imprisonment.

In 1720 he enrolled at the original St Martin’s Lane Academy in Peter Court, London, run by Louis Chéron and John Vanderbank. Fellow students included future art-world figures Joseph Highmore, William Kent, and Arthur Pond. The academy folded around 1724, roughly when Vanderbank fled to France to dodge his creditors. Hogarth later recalled: "this lasted a few years but the treasurer sinking the subscription money the lamp stove etc were seized for rent and the whole affair put a stop to."

He then joined another drawing school in Covent Garden, which opened in November 1724 under Sir James Thornhill, serjeant painter to George I. Hogarth later said that even as an apprentice he had been thinking about "the painting of St Pauls and gree[n]wich hospital", referring to Thornhill’s huge decorative schemes for St Paul’s Cathedral’s dome and the Painted Hall at Greenwich Hospital.

He also became a member of the Rose and Crown Club, alongside Peter Tillemans, George Vertue, Michael Dahl, and other artists and connoisseurs.

**Career**

By April 1720 Hogarth was working as an independent engraver, initially producing coats of arms, shop bills, and book illustrations.

In 1727 tapestry worker Joshua Morris hired him to design *The Element of Earth*. Morris later heard that Hogarth was "an engraver, and no painter" and refused to accept the finished work. Hogarth sued him in Westminster Court and won the case on 28 May 1728.

**Early works**

His early satirical pieces included *An Emblematical Print on the South Sea Scheme* (circa 1721, published 1724), targeting the 1720 stock market crash known as the South Sea Bubble, which ruined many English investors. In the bottom left corner, figures representing Protestants, Catholics, and Jews gamble; in the middle sits a huge merry-go-round-like machine that people are climbing onto. Above it a goat bears the words "Who'l Ride". The scene is chaotic, with well-dressed people streaming toward the ride, mocking the crowd’s foolish rush to buy stock in a company that did little besides issue shares.

Other early works included *The Lottery* (1724); *The Mystery of Masonry brought to Light by the Gormagons* (1724); *A Just View of the British Stage* (1724); various book illustrations; and the small print *Masquerades and Operas* (1724). That last piece satirised contemporary fads: the masquerades of Swiss impresario John James Heidegger, popular Italian opera singers, John Rich’s pantomimes at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and the outsized fame of Lord Burlington’s protégé, architect and painter William Kent. Hogarth returned to this theme in 1727 with *The Large Masquerade Ticket*.

In 1726 he produced twelve large engravings for Samuel Butler’s *Hudibras*. He thought highly of them, and they rank among his best early work, though they were based on small book illustrations.

Over the next few years he turned to small "conversation pieces"—oil groups of full-length portraits, 12 to 15 inches high. Between 1728 and 1732 he painted *The Fountaine Family* (circa 1730), *The Assembly at Wanstead House*, *The House of Commons examining Bambridge*, and several pictures of the main actors in John Gay’s popular *The Beggar’s Opera*. He also sketched real-life subject Sarah Malcolm two days before her execution.

One of his masterpieces from this period shows an amateur performance by children of John Dryden’s work.