Enfilade

From the press release for the exhibition:

Squalor City: William Hogarth’s London

Pruzan Art Center, Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut, 23 September — 13 December 2025

Curated by Miya Tokumitsu

William Hogarth, Night, 1738, etching, from the suite of four etchings The Four Times of Day (Davison Art Collection, Wesleyan University, Gift of George W. Davison (BA Wesleyan 1892), 1943.D1.102.4; photo by T. Rodriguez).

Wesleyan University’s Pruzan Art Center will highlight 18th-century British prints by William Hogarth from the Davison Art Collection, the first exhibition focused on the works of Hogarth at Wesleyan in three decades.

A peerless storyteller with great satirical flourish, William Hogarth (1697–1764) brings spectators into the raucous streets and parlors of Georgian London, at once the center of a mighty empire and, in the artist’s view, a den of grifters, social climbers, cynics, and fools. Though his images teem with references to actual personalities and places of 18th-century London, Hogarth’s concerns were more universal than specific. With a balance of humor and sincerity, his art contends with the quandaries of how to hew to a moral path within a competitive, market-driven society; how to build social institutions that serve their communities faithfully; and fundamentally, what kind of society the people of a given time and place ought to build—all questions that demand our attention in the present.

Squalor City draws from the Davison Art Collection’s deep holdings of Hogarth’s prints. It features several complete series by Hogarth, including The Harlot’s Progress, The Rake’s Progress, Marriage à la Mode, and The Four Stages of Cruelty, along with other works by the artist. The exhibition is curated by Miya Tokumitsu, the Donald T. Fallati and Ruth E. Pachman Curator of the Davison Art Collection.

Tokumitsu has found it important to highlight different strengths of the Davison Art Collection across the three previous exhibitions since the Pruzan Art Center opened in February 2024. This, the fourth exhibition in the space, will be the first show in the Goldrach Gallery dedicated wholly to historical art. “As the United States prepares to mark 250 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, now seems an apt time to take a measured look at the colonial power from which our state emerged—England during the Georgian era,” Tokumitsu said. “This was William Hogarth’s world, which he documented and critiqued in his art. Many of the issues Hogarth contends with remain of immediate concern.”

Tokumitsu said Hogarth was an engaging storyteller and excelled in creating serial narratives. “While each sheet in his various series is entertaining and meaningful in its own right, viewing Hogarth’s complete series allows spectators to glean the fullness of his creativity and narrative verve,” Tokumitsu said.

Tokumitsu noted that George W. Davison strove to collect canonical works of European graphic art, and that Hogarth is a towering figure in this history. “Hogarth’s prints were instrumental to the tradition of satire and caricature in print, and his influence extends to Francisco de Goya and Honoré Daumier,” Tokumitsu said. “Contemporary artists, including David Hockney, continue to find Hogarth’s work meaningful for their practice.”

The Pruzan Art Center’s Goldrach Gallery is located at 238 Church Street in Middletown, between Wesleyan’s Olin Memorial Library and the Frank Center for Public Affairs. The Davison Art Collection holds more than 25,000 works of art on paper, including prints, photographs, and drawings. The print collection is one of the foremost at a college or university in the United States. The collection supports teaching and learning in many ways, and was established at Wesleyan University with the founding gifts of George Willets Davison, class of 1892.