Enfilade

Presented by the Lewis Walpole Library:

Frédéric Ogée | Art and Truth: William Hogarth and the English Enlightenment

28th Lewis Walpole Library Lecture

Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, 12 February 2026

William Hogarth, Self-Portrait, ca. 1735, oil on canvas (New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, B1981.25.360).

William Hogarth was a pioneering painter and engraver of 18th-century Britain and is often considered as one of the most important figures in the rise of an English school of art. His art engaged in an unprecedented manner with the ideas, debates, and values of the English Enlightenment, translating them into accessible visual narratives, encouraging the development of active critical thinking. As such his art reflected and nourished the English Enlightenment’s empiricist agenda—the idea that knowledge comes from observation and experience—to which he gave accessible visibility by bringing art into the realm of popular culture and public discourse, and putting the distinctions between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art under serious stress. His major contribution to the promotion of a ‘modern’ (and English) conception of art is the unflinching priority he always gave to truth over beauty in his representations, a feature, remarkably, that has remained characteristic of British art ever since.

Frédéric Ogée is Emeritus Professor of British Literature and Art History at Université Paris Cité and École du Louvre. His main period of research is the long eighteenth century, and his publications include two collections of essays on William Hogarth, as well as ‘Better in France?’ The Circulation of Ideas across the Channel in the Eighteenth Century (Lewisburg, 2005), Diderot and European Culture (Oxford, 2006; repr.2009), and J.M.W. Turner, Les paysages absolus (Paris, 2010). He also co-edited Jardins et civilisations (Valenciennes, 2019) following a conference at the European Institute for Gardens and Landscapes in Caen. In 2006–07, he curated the first-ever exhibition of Hogarth for the Louvre Museum. He is currently working on a series of four large monographs in French on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British artists. The first one, Thomas Lawrence: Le génie du portrait anglais was published in December 2022. The second one, on the landscape artist J.M.W. Turner, will be published early in 2026.

Thursday, 12 February 2026, 5.30pm
Yale University Art Gallery Auditorium