Description:
Original antique copper engraving by William Hogarth
Published by Craddock and Baldwin, London, 1820
Complete set of 8
Plate 1
Tom has come into his fortune on the death of his miserly father. While the servants mourn, he is being measured for new clothes. He is also rejecting the hand of his pregnant fiancee, Sarah Young, whom he had promised to marry (she is holding his ring and her mother is holding his love letters). He will pay her off, but it is clear that she still loves him.
Plate 2
Tom is at his morning levee in London, attended by musicians and other hangers-on all dressed in expensive costumes. Surrounding Tom from left to right: a music master at a harpsichord; a fencing master; a quarterstaff instructor; a dancing master with a violin; a landscape architect; an ex-soldier offering to be a bodyguard; a bugler of a fox hunt club. At lower right is a jockey with a silver trophy. The instructor looks disapprovingly on both the fencing and dancing masters. Both masters appear to be in the French style, which was a subject Hogarth loathed
Plate 3
The third plate depicts a wild party or orgy under way at a brothel. The whores are stealing the drunken Toms watch. On the floor is a night watchmans staff and lantern. The scene takes place at the Rose Tavern a famous brother in Covent Garden. The prostitutes have black spots on their faces to cover syphilitic sores.
Plate 4
In the fourth, he narrowly escapes arrest for debt by Welsh bailiffs (ie. Leeks, A Welsh Emblem, in their hats) as he travels in a sedan chair to a party at St. Jamess Palace to celebrate Queen Carolines birthday on Saint Davids Day (Saint David is the patron saint of Wales). On this occasion he is saved by the intervention of Sarah Young, the girl he had earlier rejected. She is apparently a dealer in millinery. In comic relief, a man filling a street lantern spills the oil on Toms head. This is a sly reference to how blessings on a person were accompanied by oil poured on the head. In this case the blessing being the saving of Tom by Sarah, although Rakewell, being a rake, will not take the moral lesson to heart. In the engraved version, lighting flashes in the sky and a young pickpocket has just emptied Toms pocket. The painting, however, shows the young thief stealing Toms cane and has no lighting.
Plate 5
In the fifth, Tom attempts to salvage his fortune by marrying a rich but aged old Maid at St Marylebone. In the background Sarah arrives holding their child while her indignant mother struggles with a guest
Plate 6
The sixth painting shows Tom pleading for the assistance of the Almighty in a gambling den at Sohos White Club after losing his new fortune. Neither he nor the other obsessive gamblers seem to have noticed a fire breaking out behind them.
Plate 7
All is lost and Tom is incarcerated in the notorious Fleet debtors prison. He ignores the distress of both his angry new (old) wife and faithful Sarah, who cannot help him this time. Both the beer boy and the jailer demand money from him. Tom begins to go mad, as indicated by both a telescope for celestial observation poking out of the barred window and an alchemy experiment in the background. Besides Tom is a rejected play, another inmate is writing a pamphlet on how to solve the National debt. Above the bed at right is an apparatus for wings.
Plate 8
Finally insane and violent, in the eighth painting he ends his days in Bethlehem Hospital (Bedlam), Londons celebrated mental asylum. Only Sarah Young is there to comfort him, but Rakewell continues to ignore her. While some of the details in these pictures may appear disturbing to modern eyes, they were commonplace in Hogarths day. For example, the fashionably dressed women in this last paining have come to the asylum as a social occasion, to be entertained by the bizarre antics of the inmates.
William Hogarth FRSA (10 November 1697 – 26 October 1764) was an English painter, printmaker, pictorial satirist and social critic, best known for his satirical and often scandalous depictions of London life. His works became widely popular and mass-produced via prints in his lifetime, and he was by far the most significant English artist of his generation.
Hogarth was born in Smithfield in the City of London to a lower-middle-class family. His father underwent periods of mixed fortune and was at one time imprisoned in lieu of outstanding debts when the young Hogarth was just 10, an event which undoubtedly informed William's paintings and prints.
Hogarth apprenticed to a silversmith/engraver at seventeen, by twenty-three Hogarth had set himself up as an independent copper-plate engraver and enrolled in the Academy of Painting in St Martin’s Lane. Throughout the following four decades he pursued both printing and painting with a mixture of skill, innovation and self-promotion, deploying his extraordinary artistic imagination as a way of supporting himself.
Hogarth produced his satirical narratives as descriptive sequences, like chapters in a novel or scenes in a play. These narratives invariably conveyed a moral lesson. In A Harlot's Progress (1732), Hogarth traces a naive country lass being gradually seduced into a life of prostitution; A Rake's Progress (1735) depicts the son of a wealthy landowner squandering his inheritance being cast, destitute and alone, into a mental asylum.
With Hogarth's growing success he used his art to make social and political statements, often targeting the urbanisation of London and the ensuing prevalent crime. Works created in this atmosphere include Industry and Idleness (1747), Gin Lane (1751) and The Four Stages of Cruelty (1751), which respectively addressed embracing the Protestant work ethic, alcoholism and animal welfare.
A highly highly regarded painter, Hogarth was unique in being able to use his talents as an engraver to reproduce his own work in the form of copper-engraved plates, which he then printed from. He thus was able to distribute his works to a much larger audience. These copper-plate engraved prints were published in Hogarth's lifetime but there were also subsequent editions, as the copper-plates changed hands after his death.
His wife, Jane, inherited the plates and continued to sell his work in what was essentially a second edition. When Jane died, her estate passed to Mary Lewis, her cousin; who sold the rights to William Hogarth's copper plates to the publisher John Boydell, who went on to publish a third edition. By 1804, Boydell's business faced insolvency and a few years later in 1820 the copper-plates changed hands again when Craddock & Baldwin acquired them and published the last known edition of Hogarth's works in “The Complete Works of Hogarth”.
In the early 20th century the majority of Hogarth's plates were sold to the British government. During the First World War the need for metal was such that the plates were melted down for the production of munitions.
