Online | Hogarth’s Topographies: ‘The Five-Day Peregrination’
Hogarth’s Tour / Frontispiece, An Account of What Seemed Most Remarkable in the Five Days Peregrination, 27 November 1781, etching and aquatint in sepia ink with hand coloring on laid paper; sheet 23.6 × 34.5 cm (Lewis Walpole Library H67).
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From The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale Library:
Jacqueline Riding and Caroline Patey | ‘The Five-Day Peregrination’: A Dizzy Journey through the Topographical History of Kent
William Hogarth’s Topographies: A Series of Conversations
Online, The Lewis Walpole Library, Wednesday, 20 July 2022, noon (EDT)
Topography is central to William Hogarth’s canonical progress series in which London settings play a decisive narrative role. Lesser-known works by the artist, however, also engage with topographical representation. Pierre Von-Ow’s online exhibition William Hogarth’s Topographies considers the artist’s illustrations of national and colonized geographies beyond the metropole. The county of Kent is the site of a tour undertaken in May 1732 by Hogarth and a group of friends who collectively memorialized the adventure as The Five-Day Peregrination. The exhibition presents the peregrination as both a jesting imitation of the Grand Tour of the landscapes and monuments of Europe and as a satire of the British antiquarians who, since at least the sixteenth century, had minutely inventoried the country’s history and antiquities as a means of reclaiming a glorious past.
Jacqueline Riding and Caroline Patey will discuss the textual and visual representations recorded by Hogarth and his fellow travelers of their tour of Kent, first in manuscript (now in the British Museum) and later published as An Account of What Seemed Most Remarkable in the Five Days Peregrination (1782, etc.). The event seeks to explore the connections between this little-known project and the broader literature of actual and invented travels, as well as the history of Kent and its ties to the global expansion of the British Empire. Dr. Riding has structured her recent biography Hogarth: Life in Progress (2021) with eight interludes that address different aspects of The Peregrination. Dr. Patey is currently working on a translation of The Peregrination into Italian. Riding and Patey will share their thoughts about why the tour of Hogarth and his friends continues to demand attention bringing to this program insights from their recent and current work.
This program is organized by The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University, in conjunction with the online exhibition William Hogarth’s Topographies curated by Pierre Von-Ow, PhD candidate in Yale’s Department of The History of Art.
This is an online event, and registration is required. Register here»
Professor Caroline Patey has studied English and Comparative literature in Paris (Paris III), Dublin UCD, and the Università degli Studi, Milan, where she was Chair and Professor of English Literature until 2018. Her interests and fields of research include Renaissance literature, late Victorian culture and Modernism with a special focus on intermediality, the intersection between art, museums and literature, and the cross-border circulation of cultures and aesthetic forms. She has edited and co-edited the outcome of various collective explorations of these topics and has published numerous book-length studies on subjects as diverse as Proust and Joyce (1991), Mannerism (1996), Shakespeare and history (1998), and Henry James (2004). Together with Cynthia Roman (Yale) and Georges Letissier (Nantes), she has recently co-edited the two volumes of Enduring Presence: William Hogarth’s Afterlives in British and European Culture (2021). Since her retirement in late 2018, Caroline has taught specialist seminars in Italy and Germany (Bard College, Berlin, 2020). She co-directs a collection of critical essays on British and Anglophone literature, Prismi, Classici nel tempo, Mimesis, Milano, and sits on the board of the journal of comparative literature, Letteratura e Letterature.
Dr Jacqueline Riding specializes in British history and art of the long eighteenth century. She is the author of Jacobites: A New History of the ’45 Rebellion (2016), Peterloo: The Story of the Manchester Massacre (2018), and Hogarth: Life in Progress (2021), which has been awarded the Sunday Times Art Book of the Year 2021 and a Times and Sunday Times Paperback of 2022. Former curator of the Palace of Westminster and director of the Handel House Museum, London, she is a historical adviser on feature films including Mike Leigh’s Mr. Turner (2014) and Peterloo (2018), a consultant for museums and historic buildings including Tate Britain and Historic Royal Palaces, and Books Editor for The Art Newspaper. Jacqueline is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, the Department of the History of Art, University of York, and trustee of the Jacobite Studies Trust and [JMW] Turner’s House, London.
Call for Articles | William Hogarth and Cinema
Paul Sandby, Satire with Hogarth as a Magic Lantern Projecting a Parody of his ‘Paul before Felix’, 1753, etching
(London: British Museum, Cc,3.12)
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From the Call for Papers:
William Hogarth and Cinema
Special issue of Ecrans (Spring 2024), edited by Marie Gueden and Pierre Von-Ow
Abstracts due by 5 September 2022; drafts due by 30 March 2023
According to Sergei Eisenstein, “Diderot talked about cinema.” It could likewise be suggested that the eighteenth-century artist William Hogarth (1697–1764) inaugurated cinematic discourse. Through his visual and theoretical work, Hogarth offers a crucial contribution to the narrative and aesthetic reflections that predate—and somehow anticipate—the invention of cinema. Eisenstein did indeed comment upon and commend Hogarth’s visual productions (praising in particular his stage-like compositions and visual narratives articulated in sequences of images). The Russian filmmaker admired his English predecessor’s artistic theory, preoccupied with the movement of bodies and gazes: Eisenstein appropriated the idea of a “line of beauty” developed in Hogarth’s The Analysis of Beauty in his directing and editing. Yet, the filmic potentialities of Hogarth’s work and ideas still await extended critical and scholarly attention. The artist’s name appears sporadically in film studies that mention his influence for set designs—especially in Hollywood where Fritz Lang, Mark Robson, and Stanley Kubrick, among others, drew from Hogarth’s works to stage their historical films—and on the legacy of his artistic writings in film theory and criticism. The abundant art historical literature devoted to Hogarth, however, rarely evokes the artist’s cinematographic legacy. A special issue of the peer-reviewed journal Ecrans (No. 20, Spring 2024), to be published in French and English, seeks to explore the largely understudied connections between William Hogarth and global and expanded cinema.
We invite papers on topics that may include (but are not limited to):
• Pre-cinema, with particular emphasis on magic lanterns and early cinema, for example, filmed tableaux vivants
• William Hogarth in Hollywood, especially in the studios’ archives
• The temporality of images and sequencing of visual narratives
• Graphic novels, illustrated journals, and cartoons
• Adaptations of literary ‘Progresses’ between prints, paintings, theatre, performance, film, TV series, etc.
• Case studies from global cinema, including art documentaries
• Experimental cinema, particularly the challenging of narrative linearity
• The legacy of Hogarth’s satirical work in comedy, including productions featuring Hogarth as a character of fiction
• The legacy of Hogarth’s artistic theory and his “line of beauty” in film theory (for example through various visual shorthand systems) and criticism
• Marxist, feminist, and post-colonial currents in the reception of Hogarth’s work
Please submit a proposal by 5 September 2022 in English or French (up to 400 words), as well as a short bio, to the guest editors of this special issue: Marie Gueden (marie.gueden@univ-lyon2.fr) and Pierre Von-Ow (pierre.von-ow@yale.edu). Final papers should not exceed 8000 words. First drafts expected on 30 March 2023 for publication in April 2024. Feel free to contact us if any questions should arise before submitting your proposal. More information about Ecrans is available here.
Online | Hogarth’s Topographies: Decolonizing Sámi Representations
This Thursday, from The Lewis Walpole, Yale Library:
Joar Nango and Mathias Danbolt | Decolonizing Sámi Representations and the Legacy of Colonial Topographies
William Hogarth’s Topographies: A Series of Conversations
Online, The Lewis Walpole Library, 2 June 2022, noon EST
Topography is central to William Hogarth’s canonical progress series in which London settings play a decisive narrative role. Lesser-known works by the artist, however, also engage with topographical representation. Pierre Von-Ow’s online exhibition William Hogarth’s Topographies considers the artist’s illustrations of national and colonized geographies beyond the metropole. Among international topographical views are Hogarth’s illustrations of Sápmi in the Scandinavian north, referred to at the time as “Lapland.” Artist Joar Nango and art historian Mathias Danbolt will discuss the legacy of historical representations of the Sámi, and their reworking of colonial archives in the service of Indigenous Sámi self-determination. This is an online event, and registration is required.
Joar Nango (born 1979 in Alta, Norway) is a Sámi architect and indigenous artist, living in Norway. Nango’s work investigates the nomadic conception of space, territories, and ideas of the concept of home. He focuses on different ways of dealing with materiality, movement, and space. He has exhibited internationally both separately as an individual artist including at Documenta14 (2017), Chicago Architecture Biennial (2019), Institute for Modern art (Brisbane, 2019), National Museum of Canada (2019), Bergen Kunsthall (2021), and National Museum of Norway (2022). He is also involved in collective projects. In 2010 he established the architecture collective FFB which makes an architecture celebrating the failure of capitalism. Since 2020, he has been involved as a host and director of the ongoing TV production PCA-TV (Post-Capitalist Architecture TV) in which the 6th episode features a commissioned work for Toronto Biennial of Art in May 2022.
Mathias Danbolt is a Norwegian art historian who has a special focus on queer, feminist, and decolonial perspectives on art and visual culture. Danbolt is currently leading three collective research projects: “The Art of Nordic Colonialism: Writing Transcultural Art Histories” (2019–23), “Okta: Art and Social Communities in Sápmi” (2019–22), and “Moving Monuments: The Afterlife of Sculpture from the Danish Colonial Era” (2022–25). In 2017 Danbolt curated the visual culture exhibition Blind Spots: Images of the Danish West Indies Colony (2017–18), with Mette Kia Krabbe Meyer and Sarah Giersing at the Royal Danish Library. Danbolt is professor of art history at University of Copenhagen.
This program is organized by The Lewis Walpole Library in conjunction with the online exhibition William Hogarth’s Topographies, curated by Pierre Von-Ow, PhD candidate in Yale’s Department of The History of Art.
Online Exhibition | William Hogarth’s Topographies
Portrait of William Hogarth from a detail of the trade card of John Smith, printseller, at Hogarth’s Head, ca. 1760
(Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University, 749.00.00.02, Box 105)
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From The Lewis Walpole Library:
William Hogarth’s Topographies
Online, The Lewis Walpole Library, open from 17 May 2022
Curated by Pierre Von-Ow, with Cynthia Roman and Susan Walker
This online exhibition explores William Hogarth’s engagement with topography, an important, if lesser-known aspect of his art. Topography is understood for this project in the broad definition provided in Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755): “Description of particular places.” First, a series of engraved illustrations that the artist produced in his mid-twenties for the Travels of the French explorer Aubry de La Motraye (1723) offers an opportunity to study his methods to represent territories he only visited through textual descriptions. Then the Five Days Peregrination (1732), an impromptu trip to Kent on which Hogarth embarked with four fellows to satirize the tradition of the Grand Tour as well as the practice of antiquarians in Britain, demonstrates his irreverential relationship with historical traces of the country’s past. Finally, Hogarth’s engraved frontispiece for Joshua Kirby’s influential treatise on perspective is read in the light of the longer tradition of perspective studies in Britain and contemporary debates about the respective roles of the eye and of mathematical rules in the representation of space.
Drawing primarily from the extensive collections of Hogarth’s graphic work at the Lewis Walpole Library and other Yale collections, Hogarth’s Topographies seeks to contribute to recent historiographic efforts that re-read Hogarth’s work in a more international perspective, most notably the Hogarth and Europe retrospective at Tate Britain (November 2022 — March 2023), which stresses the necessity of approaching the artist’s work in the light of a broader European and global context that resonates in his production.
New Book | Enduring Presence: William Hogarth’s Afterlives
From Peter Lang:
Caroline Patey, Cynthia Roman, and Georges Letissier, Enduring Presence: William Hogarth’s British and European Afterlives, 2 vols. (Bern: Peter Lang, 2021), 674 pages, ISBN: 978-1800791558, £60 / $91.
Long after his death in 1764, William Hogarth is still our contemporary. Far from leading a secluded existence in museums and academies, his legacy of vibrant images and provocative ideas remains a powerful source of inventiveness and inspiration for the artists of today, as once for those of yesterday, be it on page, stage, canvas, or digital formats.
After approaching the artist by way of his challenging aesthetic philosophy and his resistance to normative categories, this two-book set considers Hogarth’s pioneering sense of performativity, which has long made him the treasured interlocutor of actors and playwrights, from David Garrick to Bertolt Brecht, or Nick Dear. His work has permeated film, television, the graphic novel, art, and narrative, which all bear witness to his versatile and powerful use of images and its resonance in the modern and contemporary age. Brimming as it is with energy, plenty, affliction, entropy, and empathy, Hogarth’s contradictory universe of chaos and beauty is in tune with ours and resonates vividly with contemporary passions and struggles. The twenty-eight essays in this collection chart the teeming legacies of William Hogarth and explore the ways in which his works and ideas were and are revisited and appropriated in the UK and across Europe. For the eighteenth-century artist lives on as an unforgotten presence, whose invigorating and challenging memory energizes multiple expressive forms, including drama, visual arts, literature, film, graphic novels, and TV serials.
Caroline Patey is Professor of English Literature at the Università degli Studi in Milan, Italy. Her research interests include Renaissance culture, late Victorian literature, Modernism, and the interactions between art, museums, and literature. Cynthia E. Roman is Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Paintings at the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University. Her research interests include the production, circulation, and collecting history of prints in eighteenth-century Britain. Georges Letissier is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Nantes University, France. His field of speciality is nineteenth-century literature (Charles Dickens, George Eliot) and contemporary British fiction (Will Self, Graham Swift, Sarah Waters, and Jeanette Winterson).
Exhibition | Hogarth and Europe
William Hogarth, The March of the Guards to Finchley, 1749–50
(London: The Foundling Museum)
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From the press release (1 November 2021) for the exhibition:
Hogarth and Europe
Tate Britain, London, 3 November 2021 – 20 March 2022
Curated by Alice Insley and Martin Myrone
Few artists have defined an era as much as William Hogarth (1697–1764), whose vivid, satirical depictions of 18th-century England continue to capture the imagination today. Tate Britain’s major exhibition Hogarth and Europe presents his work in a fresh light, seen for the first time alongside works by his continental contemporaries. It explores the parallels and exchanges that crossed borders and the cosmopolitan character of Hogarth’s art. Hogarth’s best-known paintings and prints—such as Marriage A-la-Mode (1743), The Gate of Calais (1748), and Gin Lane (1751)—are shown alongside works by famed European artists, including Jean-Siméon Chardin in Paris, Pietro Longhi in Venice, and Cornelis Troost in Amsterdam. Together they reveal how changes in society took art in new directions, both in Britain and abroad.
Featuring over 60 of Hogarth’s works, brought together from private and public collections around Europe and North America, the exhibition draws decades of research to show Hogarth in all his complexity—whether as staunch patriot or sharp critic, bawdy satirist or canny businessman. It also examines the shifting status of artists in the 18th century, from workshop artisans and court painters to independent freelancers enjoying prominence alongside actors, musicians, and writers. The rapid expansion of urban centres like London, Paris, Amsterdam, and Venice also saw the city itself become a major subject in art for the first time. Tate Britain juxtaposes these metropolitan scenes from across Europe, showing the bustling London streets of Hogarth’s Southwark Fair (1733) and The March of the Guards to Finchley (1749–50) together with vibrant depictions of Étienne Jeaurat’s Paris and Longhi’s Venice.
This was an age of opportunity and innovation, but also materialism, self-delusion, exploitation, and injustice. In Europe, new heights of luxury emerged with extreme poverty, while growing cities saw overcrowding and disease. The rising demand for consumer goods at home came at the expense of the labour and lives of enslaved and colonised people overseas. Against the backdrop of this changing world, artists like Hogarth pioneered a new painting of modern life, revealing its pleasures and dynamism but also its dangers and stark inequalities. In the 1730s he began his ‘modern moral series’: frank and engaging narratives charting the rise and fall of everyday characters corrupted by immorality and vice. Hogarth and Europe includes these celebrated series, including A Rake’s Progress (1734), which were immediately popular and widely circulated through print. At Tate Britain they are shown alongside paintings by the Italian Giuseppe Crespi, including The Flea (1707–09), and the Parisian Nicolas Lancret, to show how this new artistic genre of urban storytelling developed across Europe.
The 18th century also saw greater informality and ease in portraiture, expressing the new ideas emerging around individuality and personal freedom that remain familiar today. The exhibition culminates in a room focussing on such pictures, including Miss Mary Edwards (1742)—a painting not seen in the UK for over a century—depicting the eccentric, wealthy patron who commissioned many of Hogarth’s best-known works. Additional highlights include paintings of his sisters Mary and Anne Hogarth, as well as Heads of Six of Hogarth’s Servants (c.1750–55). Through juxtapositions with European artworks, the exhibition looks afresh at these and many other works by one of Britain’s most important artists, giving visitors a chance to see Hogarth’s position on the international stage in a new light.
Hogarth and Europe is curated by Alice Insley, Curator, British Art c 1730–1850 and Martin Myrone, former Senior Curator, pre-1800 British Art, Tate Britain (now Convenor, British Art Network at the Paul Mellon Centre). The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue featuring essays by eminent scholars and artists including Lubaina Himid and Sonia E. Barrett.
Martin Myrone and Alice Insley, eds., Hogarth and Europe (London: Tate, 2021), 208 pages, ISBN: 978-1849767682, £40 / $55.
The exhibition guide is available here»
New Book | Hogarth: Life in Progress
From Profile Books:
Jacqueline Riding, Hogarth: Life in Progress (London: Profile Books, 2021), 544 pages, ISBN: 978-1788163477, £30 / $40.
On a late spring night in 1732, a boisterous group of friends set out from their local pub. They are beginning a journey, a ‘peregrination’ that will take them through the gritty streets of Georgian London and along the River Thames as far as the Isle of Sheppey. And among them is an up-and-coming engraver and painter, just beginning to make a name for himself: William Hogarth.
Hogarth’s vision, to a vast degree, still defines the eighteenth century. In this, the first biography for over twenty years, Jacqueline Riding brings him to vivid life, immersing us in the world he inhabited and from which he drew inspiration. At the same time, she introduces us to an artist who was far bolder and more various than we give him credit for: an ambitious self-made man, a devoted husband, a sensitive portraitist, an unmatched storyteller, philanthropist, technical innovator, and author of a seminal work of art theory.
Following in his own footsteps from humble beginnings to professional triumph (and occasional disaster), Hogarth illuminates the work and life of a great artist who embraced the highest principles even while charting humanity’s lowest vices.
Jacqueline Riding is a historian and art historian specialising in British history and art of the long eighteenth century. Former curator of the Palace of Westminster and Director of the Handel House Museum, she is an award-winning author as well as a consultant for museums, galleries, historic buildings, and feature films. She was the adviser on Mike Leigh’s Mr. Turner (2014) and Peterloo (2018) and Wash Westmoreland’s Colette (2018).
Exhibition | Hogarth: Place and Progress
Press release (via Art Daily) for the exhibition:
Hogarth: Place and Progress
Sir John Soane’s Museum, London, 9 October 2019 — 5 January 2020
Hogarth: Place and Progress unites all of the paintings and engravings in Hogarth’s series for the first time, displayed across the Georgian backdrop of Sir John Soane’s Museum. Through these works the exhibition will explore the artist’s complex stance on morality, society, and the city, and the enduring appeal of his satires.
• The concept of progress has positive connotations in the twenty-first century but was often construed negatively in Hogarth’s time. Hogarth’s complex and often darkly satirical narrative progresses move from moral abandon and social ostracism, to poverty, madness and death.
• New research pinpoints precise locations in London depicted in Hogarth’s works and examines the key role they play in a moral reading of Hogarth’s paintings.
• Hogarth’s ability to see beyond social conventions continues to resonate with 21st-century audiences, as he presented with wit and empathy the depictions of immorality and vice that he perceived in all classes of society.
The Soane Museum’s own Rake’s Progress and An Election will be joined by Marriage A-la-Mode from the National Gallery, The Four Times of Day from the National Trust and The Trustees of the Grimsthorpe and Drummond Castle Trust, as well as the three surviving paintings of The Happy Marriage from Tate and the Royal Cornwall Museum. The exhibition also includes engraved series of prints, lent by Andrew Edmunds, such as The Four Stages of Cruelty, Industry and Idleness, and Gin Lane and Beer Street. The works span Hogarth’s career as an engraver and painter and the exhibition will explore Hogarth’s increasing skill—or progress—in both fields, culminating in the masterly execution of An Election.
Hogarth’s concept of ‘progress’ was influenced by John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, where the word described a journey towards moral and spiritual redemption through dismal places: from the City of Destruction to the Slough of Despond and Valley of Humiliation. Hogarth: Place and Progress explores how Hogarth’s series depict this idea. Hogarth’s narratives move from moral abandon and social ostracism, to poverty, madness and death and are often presented as highlighting the follies of the upper classes.
The exhibition also examines the idea that Hogarth was not simply ‘the people’s champion,’ but increasingly his narrative series perceived immorality and impropriety at all levels of society. Those most likely to be safe from Hogarth’s satirical wit were those who knew their ‘place’ in the social order and lived up to the positive ideals of their class, high and low alike.
Hogarth’s self-titled ‘Modern Moral Subjects’ present detailed characters, plots and changes of scene, set in specific and recognisable locations. The idea of spiritual progress is shown through visible representations of London life. The key geographic contrast is between the City of London, with its winding alleys and crumbling houses, livery guilds, the Mansion House and Monument, associated with merchants, and the West End where the landed aristocracy live in spacious and orderly squares, physically nearer to the royal place of St James. Between the two, the area around Covent Garden is repeatedly presented as a hotbed of immorality. In A Rake’s Progress, the Rake moves from the City of London to an extravagant property in the West End, then a brothel in Covent Garden, and ultimately travels outside the City walls, ending up in Bedlam, where his dissolute life has led him to insanity and death. The exhibition demonstrates how Hogarth’s ‘Modern Moral Subjects’ married the idea of progress with the moral geography of London, in a dynamic and evolving way throughout his own progress as an artist.
Bruce Boucher, David Bindman, Frederic Ogee, and Jacqueline Riding, Hogarth: Place and Progress (London: Sir John Soane’s Museum, 2019), 144 pages, ISBN: 978-1999693213, £25.
Hogarth’s ‘William Wollaston and His Family’ to Remain in Leicester
William Hogarth, William Wollaston and His Family in a Grand Interior, signed and dated 1730, oil on canvas, 99 × 125 cm (Leicester: New Walk Museum and Art Gallery).
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Press release (24 May 2019) from the UK’s Art Fund:
An important painting by 18th-century English artist William Hogarth has been saved for the nation following a crowdfunding campaign and support from Art Fund. The painting William Wollaston and His Family in a Grand Interior has been acquired by the New Walk Museum and Art Gallery in Leicester where it has been displayed on a loan basis for 75 years. The work was acquired via the Acceptance in Lieu scheme following the ‘Save the Hogarth Campaign’, which raised over £500,000.
William Hogarth was born in London at the end of the 17th century and is best known for his moral series including A Rake’s Progress and Marriage A-la-Mode and his prints such as Beer Street and Gin Lane. He was also recognised for his ‘conversation pieces’—informal group portraits that depict a large amount of people who were often families.
William Wollaston and His Family in a Grand Interior is a conversation piece that depicts the family of William Wollaston, who was MP for Ipswich from 1733 until 1741. Hogarth was commissioned to paint the piece following a period of mourning for the family after the death of William’s elder brother Charlton Wollaston, the former head of the family. This is reflected in the black clothing of some of the sitters, as well as the cloths hung over the wall decoration and Charlton’s bust on the mantelpiece. The painting has been passed down through the Leicester Wollaston family, who have lived in the county of Leicestershire since 1652.
The work will remain on display to the public until 6 September 2019, before being removed for conservation cleaning in preparation for a series of public events and and an exhibition dedicated to the work and Hogarth in early 2020.
Stephen Deuchar, Director of Art Fund, said: “This is such a great acquisition for Leicester—a real coup to have acquired a work of such landmark significance to both Hogarth’s career and the wider history of 18th-century British art. We are delighted to have helped.”
Exhibition | Hogarth: Cruelty and Humor
Press release for the exhibition:
Hogarth: Cruelty and Humor
The Morgan Library & Museum, New York, 24 May — 22 September 2019
Curated by Jennifer Tonkovich
William Hogarth, Gin Street, 1750–51, red chalk, some graphite, on paper, incised with stylus (New York: The Morgan Library & Museum, purchased by Pierpont Morgan in 1909).
The Morgan Library & Museum announces a new exhibition of satirical drawings and prints by renowned artist William Hogarth (1697–1764). Best known for his humorous political commentary, Hogarth’s work engaged a broad audience and agitated for legislative and social change. His intricate drawings and richly anecdotal scenes depict the ills and injustices of eighteenth-century urban life, exploring the connections between violence, crime, alcohol abuse, and cruelty to animals. He hoped his graphic work would amuse, shock, and ultimately edify his audience. Hogarth: Cruelty and Humor tells the story of Hogarth’s iconic images and the social realities of life in Georgian London that inspired him to advocate for reform through popular works of art. It is the first show at the Morgan devoted to this artist, whose style was so influential in British art that the word ‘Hogarthian’ remains a recognizable way of describing works of satire.
Featuring over twenty works, the show investigates Hogarth’s creative process and examines his embrace of humor, highlighting the Morgan’s exceptional cache of preparatory drawings for his two most acclaimed print series from 1751: Beer Street and Gin Lane, and The Stages of Cruelty. Hogarth’s prints documenting the dangerous impact of the gin craze, Beer Street and Gin Lane, generated popular support for the 1751 Gin Act and other reform efforts, while the Stages of Cruelty reflects the growing anxiety about episodes of human brutality in London. Included in the show are the only other two known studies related to the Stages of Cruelty; these works reveal the complex generative process of the series. Also on view are drawings from The Royal Collection Trust that represent Hogarth’s first and last forays into satire.
Fiercely independent, Hogarth was driven to innovate in order to elevate the status of British art, creating new genres and modes of expression in his painting, printmaking, and drawing. His compositions are rich with narrative detail. It was his adoption of such ‘low’ subjects, no less than his use of humor, that led him to struggle to be taken seriously throughout his career.
“William Hogarth’s works should be enjoyed for their artistry, humor, and activism, and as such hold a special place in our drawings and prints collection,” said Colin B. Bailey, director of the museum. “The artist was a keen observer of his city, and his visual anecdotes were a brilliant means of communicating to a wider public.”
“Looking closely at Hogarth’s passion for socially relevant subjects reveals the challenges he faced in being known as a satirical artist,” said Jennifer Tonkovich, Eugene and Clare Thaw Curator of Drawings and Prints. “I think our current appetite for satire allows us to appreciate Hogarth’s tremendous intelligence and ambition in constructing narratives that he hoped would change the world around him.”
S E L E C T E D P R O G R A M M I N G
Laurel Peterson, Crafting Cruelty: Hogarth’s Innovative Drawing Methods
Tuesday, June 18, noon
William Hogarth achieved substantial artistic and commercial success in his lifetime, both as a printmaker and as a painter. Despite his enduring fame, Hogarth’s drawings are today little known and rarely studied. Laurel Peterson, Moore Curatorial Fellow in the Department of Drawings and Prints, will offer new insights into Hogarth’s practice as a draftsman, shedding light on the evolution of his drawing style and the role played by drawings in the development of his most iconic satirical prints. Co-sponsored by the Sir John Soane’s Museum Foundation.
Hogarth’s Gin Craze Festival
Friday, July 19, 6:00pm
Join us for an evening of revelry inspired by the Gin Craze of the 1750s! Enjoy gin-inspired bites and craft cocktails at Morgan Café and curatorial gallery talks at 6:00 and 7:30pm in the exhibition Hogarth: Cruelty and Humor. At 7:00pm we will screen the 1946 film Bedlam, which was inspired by William Hogarth’s A Rake’s Progress.
Bedlam, directed by Mark Robson (1946, 79 minutes)
Friday, July 19, 7:00pm
In 1760s London, an actress campaigns to reform a horrific hospital for the insane, but instead finds herself committed to the institution by the corrupt head of the asylum. Starring Boris Karloff and Anna Lee, Bedlam was the last in a series of stylish horror films produced by Val Lewton for RKO Radio Pictures.
Meredith Gamer, Hogarth: Cruelty and Crime
Thursday, 12 September, 6:30pm
Meredith Gamer, Assistant Professor of Art History at Columbia University, will explore the origins, evolution, and multi-layered meanings of William Hogarth’s The Four Stages of Cruelty (1751). A tale of neglect and abuse, murder and punishment, the series was—by eighteenth-century standards—one of Hogarth’s ‘lowest’ works. Paradoxically, however, it is also one of his most ambitious, for it aims to combat some of our most basic human frailties through the medium of art. Co-sponsored by the Sir John Soane’s Museum Foundation.
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