1663 - 1664(?) |
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Birth of Richard Hogarth, the painter's father, in Westmorland, from a family of farmers and shepherds. An autodidact who eventually became a schoolmaster, he decides to go to London in his early twenties to make a fortune as teacher and author. |
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1690 |
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Richard H. marries Anne Gibbons, the daughter of a shopkeeper in whose house he was a lodger and where he probably kept his school. He publishes various grammars and manuals which fail to become standard textbooks. |
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1697 |
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Birth of William Hogarth on 10 November - i.e. six days after the celebration of King William's birthday on 4 Nov.: hence, probably, his name; and amidst the celebrations occasioned by the Peace of Ryswick (September) and the opening of Christopher Wren's new St. Paul's in December; after three children who had all died within the year of their birth and Richard (b. 1695, d. 1705), Mary (b.1699) and Anne (b. 170 1) who survived into adulthood. The family atmosphere is that of moderate Presbyterianism in a markedly nonconformist neighborhood (Bartholomew Close, off Smithfield Market), familiar with The Pilgrim's Progress, and Puritan literature. |
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1704 |
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Richard Hogarth opens a learned coffee-house in St. John's Gate (midway between Smithfield and Clerkenwell) where customers are invited to speak Latin; he himself offers to give lessons to adults. He probably had had to close his school after fifteen years of limited success. |
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1708 |
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His coffee-house business having failed, Richard Hogarth becomes insolvent and is confined for debt in the Fleet Prison. Thanks to the financial help of relatives and to the enterprising character of Anne Hogarth, Richard and his family are allowed to live "within the Rules" in lodgings near the prison. |
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1712 |
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In July, Richard is discharged after four years of virtual imprisonment by virtue of the new "Act for the Relief of Insolvent Debtors" (May 1712), an Act for which Defoe had campaigned in The Review. WH never referred to his father's bankruptcy and ensuing imprisonment; but he remained haunted by his father's humiliation as an unsuccessful author, on the verge of Grubstreet, and by the fear of social disgrace. |
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1713 |
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One of Richard's recently published textbooks having been adopted by St. Paul's School, the financial situation of the family improves. But Richard's magnum opus, a Latin-English, English-Latin dictionary, never reached the press.William is apprenticed to a goldsmith's engraver, Ellis Gamble, an undistinguished craftsman, for seven years. Apparently he had stopped attending school entirely for some time, after erratic studies both at home and at school, where he had proved to be more-e attracted by drawing and theatre-going than by grammar and Latin. French Huguenot refugees had introduced high standards of workmanship which English goldsmiths and engravers had been forced to adopt, together with new French patterns. |
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1718 |
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Death of WH's father, broken "by disappointments from great mens Promises", as WH later claimed in his autobiographical notes. |
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1720 |
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WH
sets himself up as an independent engraver, having failed to complete
his apprenticeship, perhaps on account of his family's reduced circumstances
after his father's death, or because he had realised that gold and
silver engraving was too limited and that his talents lay elsewhere
- in copper engraving and painting. |
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1720 - 1721 |
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Hack work for various Grubstreet productions such as William King's Pantheon (1721) or Charles Gildon's The New Metamorphosis (pub. 1724), but also WH's first sustained attempt at illustration with the Hudibras plates (small size). |
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1721 |
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The South Sea Scheme, one of the best and most original of the many satirical prints occasioned by the disastrous financial "bubble" of 1720; not published before 1724, as a companion piece to The Lottery , the first of WH's works in which the influence of the formal training at the Academy can be felt. |
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1723 |
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Engravings for Aubrey de la Motraye's Travels Through Europe, WH's first important illustrating commission. |
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1721 - 1724 |
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At
the St.Martin's Lane Academy WH meets William Kent, a rising and
pretentious young painter much praised by Pope and Gay and Lord
Burlington's protégé. Burlington was laying the foundations
for a Whig aesthetic influenced by the principles of Shaftesbury
(Characteristics , 1712) and of "Palladianism", to replace
what he considered the Tory and Baroque aesthetic of Queen Anne's
Board of Works, from which he had caused Wren and Hawksmoor to be
ejected in 1718. |
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1724 |
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February: Hogarth's print The Bad Taste of the Town (also called Masquerades and Operas ) turns out to be a great popular success; it ridicules Burlington and Kent as the main promoters of the vulgar and immoral entertainment's of the town - masquerade, Italian opera, pantomime. The print, which is immediately pirated, much to WH's annoyance, draws Thornhill's attention to Hogarth, whose work at that time shows many echoes of Thornhill's great paintings. A Just View of the British Stage 1724) harps on the same theme, at the expense of Drury Lane. The St. Martin's Lane Academy having closed, WH joins the new Academy opened by Thorhill in Covent Garden in an attempt to reassert his artistic leadership. WH soon becomes a regular visitor and a friend of the family. |
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1725 - 1726 |
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Two illustrations for Paradise Lost, in the manner of Thornhill's history painting. In his set of twelve large illustrations to Hudibras published the same year by subscription WH mixes the grotesque style which is his forte with the heroic style of the academic tradition. In the wake of this successful venture the small (1721) prints are published as illustrations of a new edition of Hudibras. |
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1725 |
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A commissioned altar piece painted by Kent for a new church having caused a controversy, WH contributes a Burlesque on Kent's Altarpiece probably at Thornhill's suggestion. Among the hack work of that period are illustrations for La Calprenède's Cassandra and for Beaver's Military Punishments, in the manner of Jacques Callot. |
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1726 - 1727 |
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WH
contributes some of the prints in a series of illustrations of |
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1726 |
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December: Cunicularii a topical print inspired by the case of the notorious Mrs Toft; also in December, The Punishment of Lemuel Gulliver, one of the many productions inspired by Swift's narrative, Gulliver's Travels (published in October); with obvious satirical anti-Walpolian undertones. |
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1727 |
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Other
anti-ministerial prints: |
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1726 - 1730 |
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WH,
who had turned to painting, probably with the help and encouragement
of Thornhill, produces his first painting: a tapestry cartoon which
is turned down by its commissioner, then |
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1729 |
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The
Bambridge Committee , a painting
describing the confrontation between an innocent, persecuted prisoner,
and the infamous warden of the Fleet prison, then submitted to an
investigation of his wrong doings by a Parliamentary committee -
the ugly reality behind the fiction of The Beggar's Opera.
Also The House of Commons, a rather awkward gallery of portraits,
the joint work of Thornhill (who was an M.P.) and Hogarth. Both
paintings were based on WH's eyewitness reporting. |
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1729 - 1731 |
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Several assembly groups (The Wanstead Assembly ) and "conversation pictures" (about two dozens between 1729 and 173 1) either commissioned, or sold in the studio or auctioned. Though derived from the Dutch indoor scenes of the XVII th century and the more formal family scenes of the French neoclassical tradition (Largillière, De Troy, Coypel, Mercier), they show original characteristics, with the typically Hogarthian "inverted pyramid" structure -The Woodes Rogers Family, The Ashley and Popple Families, The Fountaine Family, The Wollaston Family, or the simpler "pyramid structure", for homelier scenes - The House of Cards (a typical pair of paintings), The Children's Tea Party, A Family Party. With these innovative family pieces WH has become fashionable and famous for his good humour and his skill at rendering faces. His "comic history paintings", long before Fielding developed his views in the Preface to Joseph Andrews, are very popular to: The Christening, The Denunciation. Other contemporary commissions: Before and After, Watteauesque outdoor scenes, a kind of pastoral burlesque, much more direct and realistic than the later indoor scenes on the same subject; A Club of Gentlemen and A Midnight Modern Conversation, later (1732) engraved and published with great success in the manner of A Harlot's Progress. Hogarth's patrons are wealthy Londoners belonging to the world of the professions, of trade or of the theatre, rather than the nobility. His group or scene paintings are appreciated for their humor and likeness and esteemed to be more entertaining than really valuable, which explains why so many have been lost or destroy. |
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1731 |
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Joseph Mitchell's Epistle to Mr. Hogarth, in which WH's originality is praised. |
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1730 1731 |
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A Harlot's Progress, the first "modern history" series, probably suggested by various contemporary incidents and trials involving robbers, prostitutes, procuresses and rakes, extensively and repeatedly reported in the newspapers; especially the trial for rape of Colonel Charter is, an infamous rake, convicted and then pardoned by the King, who was the occasion for many pamphlets and prints (and may have inspired Richardson's "Mr. B." in Pamela). Also inspired by Defoe's Moll Flanders and Steele's Spectator campaign against prostitution. The six paintings (which have not survived) describing the fate of "Mary Hackabout" were completed in 1731 and the subscription for the copper plates (engraved by WH himself) opened with great success, curiosity being aroused by the complete novelty of the undertaking, with many topical details and allusions and several recognizable faces. The immense popular success of the series led to piratical imitations, pamphlets and poems; it influenced or inspired Fielding's Covent Garden Tragedy, played in June 1732. |
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1732 |
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A Scene from "The Conquest of Mexico" , an unusual conversation piece describing a performance of Dryden's play by children of the nobility to an audience of royal children - and a significant step up the ladder of patronage followed by more aristocratic portrait commissions (e.g. The Cholmondeley Family ). WH's curiosity and interest extending from royalty down to the London underworld, he also publishes a print of a notorious murderess,Sarah Malcolm (hanged in March 1732), whom he had visited and sketched in prison, and at the same time makes a portrait of the young Duke of Cumberland and sketches of the royal family for a commissioned royal conversation piece. The latter was cancelled by the influence of the Burlingtonians and the resentful William Kent, then the Court Master Carpenter; also because of the suspicion that WH had caricatured the Princess Royal in his frontispieces to Fielding's Tragedy of Tragedies in 1730. |
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1733 |
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Southwark
Fair, a large painting and
a successful print of low life, advertised for subscription together
with a planned series of eight plates, "The Progress of a Rake". |
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1734 |
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With
the support of James Ralph in the Weekly Register, WH becomes involved
in a controversy between English vs. foreign painting, against the
Italian Amigoni who had been commissioned to decorate the new St.
Bartholomew's Hospital, a work which Hogarth offered to perform
gratis - which be did in 1735. |
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1734 1735 |
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A Rake's Progress, Hogarth 's most Swiftian satire, an association which Swift himself acknowledged in his poem "The Legion" (1736), 219-230. The painting and the engraving of the series describing the life of "Tom Rakewell" from the gaming table to Bedlam is very uneven, with a notable tendency towards violence and disorder and some unusual flaws. |
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1735 |
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May:
The Engravers' Copyright Act receives the royal assent. It extends
the regulations of the literary act ("Queen Anne's Act")
of 1709 to prints, with a 14 years' copyright. The publication of
The Rake's Progress prints was deliberately delayed until the
Act took effect and appeared in August. Hogarth had been the main
promoter of the campaign in favour of the new Act, which came to
be referred to as Hogarth's Act. The number of pirated prints diminished
rapidly. The copyright period was extended from 14 to 28 years in
1767. But Hogarth himself allowed cheaper, "authorised"
copies to be made of his own prints. |
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1735 - 1736 |
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Hogarth works at a huge painting for St. Bartholomew's Hospital, The Pool of Bethesda and on various popular prints: Before and After (the indoor scenes), The Sleeping Congregation, various "groups of heads" such as The Company of Undertakers. |
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1737 |
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The
Good Samaritan at St. Bartholomew.
These two impressive paintings (The
Good Samaritan and The Pool of Bethesda), if not entirely successful, demonstrated that "history
painting" in the grand manner of the late Thornhill was not
above WH's capacity, but they did not lead to the commissions he
probably expected from religious or state patrons, though they soon
became one of the sights of London. The
Good Samaritan may have suggested
the central episode of Joseph Andrews. Other excursions into sublime
history painting during these years, among which A Scene from 'The Tempest' (1735?). |
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1738 |
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Strolling
Actresses dressing in a Barn
and The Four Times of the
Day advertised and offered
for subscription. Strolling
Actresses, a humorous satire
of theatrical illusion and heroic bombast, can be "read"
as Hogarth's comment on the 1737 Licensing Act, which forced his
friend Fielding to retire from the stage; partly inspired by Fielding's
Tumble-Down Dick, or, Phaeton in the Suds (1736). |
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1738 - 1743 |
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Jean-Baptiste
Van Loo comes to London where ho soon asserts himself as the most
fashionable portrait painter until his departure in 1742, superseding
all English portrait painters such as Vanderbank or Higher. Against
this new foreign challenge, and that offered by the young, successful,
and Italianate Allan Ramsay, Hogarth decides to become a portrait
painter himself, with Captain
Coram (1740), George Arnold (c. 1740), Miss
Mary Edwards (1742), Dr.
Benjamin Hoadly, one of the leading Latitudinarian bishops (1743?)
and Thomas Herring, then Arch-bishop of York (1744), as his most
remarkable productions. It is the period of a Self-Portrait in a
wig and of Roubiliac's terra cotta bust of WH. |
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1740 |
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Fielding refers to Hogarth in his Champion essay on satire (10 June), then in his Preface to Joseph Andrews (1742), echoed in WH's own Characters and Caricaturas , the subscription ticket for Marriage-a-la-Mode (1743), with Fielding and Hogarth laughing face to face to face. |
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1742 |
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Taste a la Mode , a caricatural painting probably made at the suggestion of Mary Edwards, WH's friend and patron. It was not turned into an engraving, but it can be seen as anticipating the Marriage a la Mode series. |
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1743 - 1745 |
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Marriage-a-la-Mode advertised for subscription, in six copper-plates engraved "by the best Masters in Paris" (WH himself doing the faces) secured during a short and largely undocumented stay in Paris where ho came to ho influenced by Quentin de la Tour's manner (June 1743): vz. Ravenet, Scotin, Baron. It is a "comic history" of high life in which the frenchified world of fashion which WH could never convert to his notions of taste and of a national art is satirized in a succession of scenes, from the comedy of manners to tragedy. The production was delayed when war broke out with France in 1744; the series was eventually published in May 1745. |
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1745 |
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An
auction of his "comic history" paintings is the occasion
for a humorous subscription ticket, The
Battle of the Pictures, in
which old masters attack Hogarth's modern histories. The auction
attracts distinguished bidders, among whom the young Horace Walpole
and William Backford. The sale represents the peak of WH's popularity
as a painter of modern history. Self-portrait with pug, retitled
Gulielmus Hogarth in 1748. The dog became a favorite emblem of his
master, both with friends and with enemies in later controversies. |
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1746 |
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The French enameler Jean André‚ Rouquet publishes a pamphlet in French, Lettres de Monsieur ** à un de ses amis à Paris, Pour lui expliquer les Estampes de Monsieur Hogarth; probably at WH's suggestion, to attract more Continental purchasers, and with the help of Marshal Belleisle (the Maréchal de Belle-Isle), then a prisoner-of-war on parole in London and one of Hogarth's assiduous French supporters. |
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1746 - 1748 |
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Already
one of the governors of St. Bartholomew's Hospital and of the Foundling's
Hospital, founded by his friend Captain Coram in 1740, Hogarth,
who had already donated the Coram portrait, launches a campaign
among his fellow artists to decorate the new buildings of the Hospital,
opened in 1745, which thus came to be decorated by donations from
Rysbrack the sculptor, Joseph Highmore, Hayman, Allen Ramsay, George
Lambert, etc., later Richard Wilson, Gainsborough, Reynolds.The
"Foundling" became (and still is) a permanent exhibition
of the best of XVIIIth-century art. |
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1746 |
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WH sold almost 10 000 impressions of a print representing the striking likeness of Simon Lord Lovat, one of the most notorious of the Highland chiefs taken prisoners and executed after the'45. |
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1747 |
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(June)
The Stage-Coach, or the Country
Inn Yard, a popular print
and (October) Industry
and Idleness, inspired by George Lillo's London Merchant (1731), in
twelve paints, an immediate success. |
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1748 |
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A trip to Paris with a few fellow artists, just after the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle. It is the occasion for preliminary sketches of the Calais Gate, which caused Hogarth to be carried before the governor as a spy. Hogarth disliked everything he saw in France. |
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1749 |
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The
Gate of Calais, or The Roast-Beef of Old England , a painting and a print, recording his
recent misadventure. |
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1750 |
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The March to Finchley , a "comic history painting" in the full sense of the term, a reminiscence of the Jacobite threat of the'45 and an echo of Tom Jones , published in 1749; but also a direct comment on the discontent in England after the peace. The print was engraved by Sullivan. In 1747 WH had designed the headpiece of Fielding's Jacobite Journal. |
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1751 |
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Gin
Lane and Beer Street, to be associated with Fielding's Enquiry into
the Causes of the Late Increase o Robbery, 1750; a deliberately
didactic, social-minded, unambiguous pair of prints. |
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1751 |
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In The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle , Smollett derides Hogarth, a close friend of his personal enemy Fielding, as "Pallett", a pretentious, talkative, dogmatic English painter in Paris, ignorant of foreign art, more remarkable as a businessman than as an artist - though Smollett also bas several laudatory allusions to WH in his novels. As a matter-of-fact WH's insularity, with his emphasis on didacticism and on thegrotesque, brings him against the taste of the opening decade. A campaign bas been launched by St. Martin's Lane artists themselves for the creation of a national academy in the French manner, as the best way to encourage and distinguish native artists - not the informal, democratic structure of Hogarth's school of art, but a state institution with annual exhibitions, prizes, social status and royal favour. |
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1753 |
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November:
The Analysis of Beauty (advertised as early as Feb. 1751), WH's
retort to the projected academy, with two large plates of illustrations.
In it lie offers his theory about the "line of beauty"
and the pyramid structure, about variety in apparent regularity,
but also fascinating details about his art as a painter and engraver,
with idiosyncratic observations on contemporary life, manners, attitudes,
fashions, complexions, etc. and how to imitate them in lines, colours
and shadows. It was immediately the subject of his own friends'
humorous comments and of satirical attacks from his enemies, notably
a series of rather coarse but successful popular paints by Paul
Sandby burlesquing Hogarth's own burlesque. |
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1754 |
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False
Perspective , published as a frontispiece to his friend Joshua Kirby's
Method of Perspective made Eas; a humorous paint with an uncanny
Escher-like effect. |
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1755 |
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The
idea of a state academy being again the occasion of debates and
pamphlets, WH seems to have withdrawn or at least absented himself
from the St. Martin's Lane academy, where the state academy had
many supporters, and whose leading figure now was Reynolds. He had
become the most successful portrait painter of the day, the darling
of the fashionable, world whom Hogarth had alienated. |
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1756 |
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Two
successful popular plates in the war-like atmosphere of the Seven
Years' War: The Invasion, 1. France and 2. England. |
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1756 |
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Discouraged
by the difficulties encountered in the engraving of the Election
series, WH announces in the press that he intends to abandon the
comic histories and retreat into portrait painting - as if to challenge
Reynolds. Most of the portraits of these years are characteristically
unfinished or without backgrounds, some in the manner of Rembrandt's
chiaroscuro; e.g. David Garrick
and his Wife, Lady Thornhill,
Saunders Welch, Lord Charlemont, Boy in a Green Coat and above all
Hogarth's Servants and The
Shrimp Girl. |
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1757 |
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WH is appointed Sergeant-Painter to the King, an honorary position (£10 a year) which Thornhill had held before him and passed to his son John, who died that year. But this sinecure implied the monopoly on all the painting or gilding made in the royal palaces and stables, on ships, tents, banners, coaches, etc.; the actual work was done by deputies and the Sergeant-Painter received lucrative fees. |
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1758 |
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Hogarth,
Painting the Comic Muse, a self-portrait, very different in mood
from the1748 Gulielmus Hogarth ; the reverse image of the earlier
portrait in fact, almost a caricature, especially in the engraving. |
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1759 |
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The
Lady's last Stake, another, homelier genre scene, WH's last "comic
history", painted at the request of Lord Charlemont; also Sigismunda,
at the request of Sir Richard Grosvenor who had asked for a similar
genre scene, leaving the subject to Hogarth, and who had to pay
for this austere painting in which WH had undertaken to outdo the
Italian painters of the seicento, who had recently reached absurdly
high prices at a sensational auction. Also Satan, Sin and Death,
WH's last attempt at sublimity, a Miltonian scene inspired by Edmund
Burke's Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful (1757);
left unfinished, but engraved in 1767, it probably inspired Fuseli
and Blake and the vogue of "sublime" romantic painting.
|
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1759 - 1761 |
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Only a few minor prints, after two years of virtual retirement owing to bad health. |
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1760 - 1762 |
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Enthusiasm Delineated, the only important print of this relatively barren period; probably sparked by Reynolds' three Idler essays (Nos. 76, 79, 82) published in 1759, in which bc praised the Italian Counter-Reformation masters for their sublimity in a way which could not but give offence to Hogarth's staunch Anglican principles. The print remarried unpublished until 1762, when it was offered as Credulity, Superstition and Fanaticism, the religions attack on Roman Catholicism and Methodism now merged into a general satire of credulity, and made into a companion piece to the 1736 Sleepy Congregation, revised for the occasion. |
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1760 |
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Sterne's
Tristram Shandy (an immediate best-seller) bas several laudatory
references to Hogarth, who is approached by common acquaintances
for an illustration which was done accordingly, engraved by Ravenet
and published as a frontispiece to the second edition, published
the same year. In all WH did three illustrations for Tristram Shandy. |
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1761 |
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A
break between the Foundling artists and the Society of Artists enables
Hogarth to join them again and ho even contributes two prints to
the catalogue of the 1761 Exhibition held in May, with four paintings
(The Lady's Last Stake, The Gate of Calais, An Election Entertainment,
Sigismunda) and three portraits - none of them recent works, but
a sensational return to prominence, though Sigismunda provoked so
much adverse criticism that ho had to withdraw it. |
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1762 |
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March:
The Farmer's Return, a frontispiece to a play by Garrick and (April)
a commemorative sketch of Henry Fielding as a frontispiece to Murphy's
first complete edition of HF's works. |
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1763 |
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In
May, WH published his print of John Wilkes , a successful piece
of propaganda, designed as a companion peace to the earlier (1746)
Lord Lovat: the traitor and the demagogue. The print was the cause
of more attacks in verse (Churchill's Epistle to William Hogarth
) and hostile caricatures, consistently portraying WH as his dog.
His answer was The Bruiser, with Churchill as Bruin the drunken
bear replacing Hogarth's face in the 1748 Gulielmus Hogarth, portrait
and his pug-dog "Trump" pissing on Chuchill's Epistle. |
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1763 - 1764 |
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WH, whose health is seriously damaged, and who has become increasingly obsessive and pessimistic, revises his copperplates, writes commentaries on them and autobiographical notes. |
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1764 |
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April:
The Tailpiece, or The Bathos, WH's ultimate published print. It
reflects his gloomy state of mind: the whole world and Time himself
coming to an end, in a heaping together of visual and verbal puns,
a typically Augustan gesture of final annihilation reminiscent of
the restoration of Chaos at the end of Pope's Dunciad. |