William Hogarth (London, November 10, 1697 - London, October 26, 1764) was an English painter, engraver and satirical printmaker.
William Hogarth's Biography
He was the son of Richard Hogarth, a Latin teacher and not very wealthy writer, and Anne Gibbons.
The painter was named William in honor of King William III. A pupil, from 1718 to 1720, of the silver coat-of-arms engraver Ellis Gamble, from whom he learned the way of arranging rich and complex decoration within a small area, he became independent and executed mainly signs and store signs, popular in character.
Devoting himself almost exclusively to satirical engravings on topical subjects, having London society as their subject, he began to make caricatures of events in the life of the theater, publishing in 1724 the engravings Masquerades and Operas, and illustrations for John Milton's Paradise Lost.
In 1728 he executed a canvas with a scene from John Gay's play The Beggar's Opera, among several versions, one is preserved in the Tate Gallery in London, depicting the actors and some aristocratic spectators.
In 1729, he married the daughter of the famous painter James Thornhill, painting in the same year the lost Portrait of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn for Vauxhall Gardens. Between 1729 and 1733 he worked mainly as a portrait painter for an upper-class clientele.
To this period date the first works on the type of conversation pieces, conversation scenes, that is, group portraits alien to any pretense of officialdom, which starting from an anecdotal cue of private life, rise thanks to careful psychological analysis to true painting of ambience and costume, of these are:
The Marriage of Stephen Bechingham and Mary Cox, 1729, New York; The Wollaston Family, 1730, Leicester; The Fountaine Family, Philadelphia; Fishing, London, Dulwich College; Reception at Wanstead House, 1730, Philadelphia; Recitation of the "Emperor of the Indies," 1731, in private collection.
In the early 1730s the painter executed his first series of paintings, defined by himself as "modern moral subjects," in which each series is devoted to a single character, whose rise and decline he analyzes in different episodes.
In the series with the Career of a Prostitute of 1732, six lost paintings and related engravings, he describes the vicissitudes of a naive peasant girl ensnared by the city, and in the Career of a Libertine, in eight paintings, made in 1732-33 and preserved at John Soane's Museum in London, engraved in 1735,
in which the gradual corruption and consequent downfall of a fashionable young man is captured, has its epilogue in the painting with the young man's death in Bedlam Asylum, in which mourning his death half-naked on the right is only the girl seduced in his youth, amid the indifference and jeers of the other inmates, while the two ladies refer to the young man's past.
Thanks to the financial success of the "careers," he could easily move on to compositions in the historical genre, producing The Good Samaritan and Bethesda Pond for Saint Bartholomew's Hospital. From 1736 is the series Four Moments of the Day, is the title of a series of paintings that echoes that of four engravings published in 1738.
Both paintings and etchings depict scenes of daily life on the streets of London. From 1737 is the series A Day in London, in four paintings and now in a private collection.
From 1740 is the Portrait of Captain Coram, kept at the Foundling Hospital, London, in which a burgher is portrayed, with all the attributes of prosperity; also from this period are the portraits: the Graham Children, 1742, London, Tate Gallery; Mary Edwards, 1742, New York, Frick Collection; Bishop Hoadly, 1743; Mrs Salter, 1744, the Self-Portrait with Dog, 1745, the latter three all in the Tate Gallery, London.
Pictorial genre
It is the artist himself who reveals to us the sources from which he draws for his works, namely theater and contemporary English literature:
'I wished to compose paintings on canvas similar to representations on the scenes; and I hope they will be judged by the same criterion; I have tried to treat my subject as a dramatic author; my painting is my stage, and actors are men and women who by means of acts and gestures figure a pantomime.
Hogarth was part of a cultural context in which with the rise of the bourgeoisie and the social values of common sense and respectability, artists included a concrete and easily identifiable morality in their paintings, combined with a taste for storytelling and a careful analysis of real, everyday aspects.
William Hogarth Works
- Before and After, 1730-1731, London, Tate Gallery (first version); Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum (second version)
- The Distressed Poet, 1736, Birmingham, Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery
- The Company of Undertakers, 1736, London, National Portrait Gallery, London
- Four Moments of the Day, 1738
- The Shrimp Girl, c. 1740-1745, London, National Gallery
- Graham Children, 1742, London, National Gallery
- Marriage à-la-mode: Arrangement, c. 1743, London, National Gallery
- Marriage à-la-mode: The Bath, c. 1743, London, National Gallery
- Marriage à-la-mode: The Death of the Lady, c. 1743, London, National Gallery
- Marriage à-la-mode: The dressing table, c. 1743, London, National Gallery
- Marriage à-la-mode: The Inspection, c. 1743, London, National Gallery
- Marriage à-la-mode: Tête à tête, c. 1743, London, National Gallery
- The Four Stages of Cruelty, 1751
- The Election Banquet, 1754, London, John Soane Museum