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.
