Works by William Hogarth
317 works · 224 ms
William Hogarth told stories of his own day in series of pictures he called modern moral subjects, painted first and then issued as engravings, and the prints made them widely popular in his lifetime.
Most of the works below are prints, and printmaking was his first trade: apprenticed to an engraver, he cut trade cards, and by 1720 he was engraving shop bills and coats of arms for himself. Pirated copies of his Harlot's and Rake's series pushed him to lobby Parliament for the Engravers' Copyright Act of 1735, the first such law to protect visual work. Beer Street and Gin Lane, issued in 1751 in support of the Gin Act, sets two streets side by side: stout drinkers with tankards in one, and in the other a gin-sodden mother on a stair letting her baby tumble over the rail.
Several paintings come from the theatre. In The Beggar's Opera of 1729 the highwayman Macheath stands in irons between two women who each believe they are his wife, while spectators watch from seats on the stage itself. For David Garrick as Richard III, in 1745, he was paid £200, a fee he claimed no English painter had matched for one portrait; the actor starts up from his couch, hand raised, armour on the floor beside him. That year he also painted himself with his pug, Trump, his likeness propped on volumes of Shakespeare, Milton and Swift and a curved line on the palette labelled as the line of beauty, the idea behind his 1753 book. The Shrimp Girl, a sketch in oil he never finished, shows a young fishwoman smiling under a broad hat.
Sources: Wikipedia, National Gallery, Victoria and Albert Museum, Walker Art Gallery, Yale Center for British Art.
