Background
William Hogarth was born at St. Bartholomew's Close in London, United Kingdom, on November 10, 1697. He was the son of Richard Hogarth, a school teacher of Latin and textbook writer, and Anne Gibbons.
William Hogarth
William Hogarth joined the St. Martin's Lane Academy in 1720.
Hogarth Lane, Great West Rd, London W4 2QN, United Kingdom
Hogarth's House, the museum of William Hogarth on the Hogarth Roundabout in London.
William Hogarth joined the St. Martin's Lane Academy in 1720.
Hogarth Lane, Great West Rd, London W4 2QN, United Kingdom
Hogarth's House, the museum of William Hogarth on the Hogarth Roundabout in London.
painter printmaker satirist editorial cartoonist
William Hogarth was born at St. Bartholomew's Close in London, United Kingdom, on November 10, 1697. He was the son of Richard Hogarth, a school teacher of Latin and textbook writer, and Anne Gibbons.
William Hogarth left school at his own request in 1713, and became an apprentice of the silver-plate engraver and dealer in plate Ellis Gamble in Leicester, Leicestershire, United Kingdom. Here, he learned engraving art of different products, such as trade cards, for example.
To pursue his training as a painter, Hogarth joined the St. Martin's Lane Academy in 1720.
William Hogarth set himself up independently in his profession in 1720.
Two years later, he began producing small portraits in oils, done in groups and called by him "conversation pieces," and from then to the end of his career he continued to practice the art of painting along with engraving.
In 1724, he published his first independent print, Masquerades and Operas, Burlington Gate, an attack on English subservience to foreign art.
Hogarth's first important work was the printing of plates for booksellers, notably the series of twelve engravings for Samuel Butler's Hudibras that he made in 1726. A year later, William debuted as a painter, when Joshua Morris, a tapestry worker, hired him to prepare a design for the Element of Earth, but the completed work was declined.
The turning point in Hogarth's career (it is said to have affected the reconciliation with his irate father-in-law) was the success of the Harlot's Progress prints in 1732. Unfortunately, the original paintings were destroyed by fire in 1755.
His next series of engravings from paintings, entitled A Rake's Progress, was published in 1735, and in 1745 appeared the famous Marriage à la Mode.
Encouraged by his friend Henry Fielding, Hogarth next turned to moral satires that burlesqued baroque grand-manner painting; that is, he chose epic models rather than dramatic ones. The masterpiece of this group is the four prints of An Election Entertainment (1755 - 1758).
In the 1736, William Hogarth had been active in a scheme for decorating the pleasure resort of Vauxhall Gardens with contemporary paintings and sculpture, and in 1745 he followed this up with an even more ambitious project for the presentation of works by living artists to the Foundling Hospital, the first donors being largely recruited from the St. Martin's Lane Academy, which he had revived in 1735.
Hogarth threw himself with equal energy into moral and humanitarian causes as a governor of St. Bartholomew's Hospital and a foundation governor of the Foundling Hospital, frequently joining forces with Fielding, for example, in an anti-gin campaign.
In 1753, he published a treatise on aesthetics, Analysis of Beauty, which was severely handled by hostile critics.
Hogarth was appointed sergeant painter by king George II in 1757, to succeed his brother-in-law, John Thornhill.
William Hogarth was at work on his last print, the Bathos, a mock-rococo counterpart to Albrecht Dürer's Melancolia, when he was taken ill and died at Leicester Fields on October 26, 1764.
William Hogarth's narrative satires became widely popular and mass-produced via prints in his lifetime, what gained him a Continental reputation. In particular, there were a lot of his works in the Continental book illustration of the 18th and early 19th centuries, especially in Germany and France.
During his apprenticeship, Hogarth invented a system of visual mnemonics, a linear shorthand that enabled him to reconstruct figures and scenes which had arrested his attention.
The painter had a great influence on many artists, writers and musicians, including John Collier, named "Lancashire Hogarth." The ballet The Rake's Progress of Gavin Gordon as Igor Stravinsky's opera The Rake's Progress were inspired by similarly-named Hogarth's series. An English writer Nick Dear made William Hogarth the main character of his play The Art of Success. The painter was also interpreted by Toby Jones in a movie A Harlot's Progress in 2006.
There is a museum of William Hogarths, Hogarth's House, on the Hogarth Roundabout in London.
The 250th anniversary of Hogarth's death was marked by special exhibitions organized by Hogarth's House and the Foundling Museum in 2014.
The Graham Children
Marriage A-la-Mode
The Painter and His Pug
The Polling
The Shrimp Girl
An Election Entertainment
Canvassing for Votes
Chairing the Member
Evening
Noon
Morning
Scene from Shakespeare's The Tempest
The Gate of Calais
Miss Mary Edwards
Before
After
Portrait of Inigo Jones, English Architect
The Wedding of Stephen Beckingham and Mary Cox
The Beggar's Opera VI
William Jones, the Mathematician
Portrait of Captain Thomas Coram
March of the Guards to Finchley
Hogarth Painting the Comic Muse
The Bench
Hogarth's Servants
The Sleeping Congregation
The Strode Family
The Distrest Poet
Scene in a Tavern
David Garrick with his wife Eva-Maria Veigel
Portrait of Dr. Benjamin Hoadly
The Pool of Bethesda
David Garrick as Richard III
As a moralist, William Hogarth played on various aspects of life that in his rational and unsentimental Low Church morality he considered to be either good or bad.
Thus, in two famous prints of 1751 he contrasted the frightful rewards of those who indulge in cheap gin (Gin Lane) and the prosperous well-being of those who drink good English beer (Beer Street).
This exclusion of intermediate shades of morality was an important part of Hogarth's equipment as a satirist.
In the 1750s, William Hogarth was an acknowledged leader of his profession, and he led the agitation against proposals to found a royal academy on the French model. Hogarth's opposition to an academy is intelligible in the light of his earlier efforts to raise the status of British art and free its practitioners from dependence on aristocratic patronage.
Hogarth believed that if artists united to exhibit their works and especially to sell prints made from their paintings they would be able to resist the influence of the connoisseurs, against whom he waged a lifelong war
Before 1728, William Hogarth became a Freemason in the Lodge at the Hand and Apple Tree Tavern, Little Queen Street. Later, he also belonged to the Carrier Stone Lodge and the Grand Stewards' Lodge.
In his draft for an autobiography, William Hogarth wrote that he was exceptionally fond of shows and spectacles as a child and that he excelled in mimicry.
William Hogarth married Jane Thornhill, daughter of Sir James Thornhill, a well-known painter, whose art school he had formerly attended, in 1729.
