norman lebrecht
October 31, 2026
From the leading arts substack
William Hogarth – Into The Streets of Georgian London
A panel from Marriage-a-la-Mode
William Hogarth, who died 262 years ago tomorrow, was by far the most significant English artist of his generation. Charles Lamb deemed Hogarth’s images to be books, filled with “the teeming, fruitful, suggestive meaning of words. Other pictures we look at; his pictures we read.”
Without denigrating their quality, which was of the first rank of realistic portraiture, I would not be the first to suggest that Hogarth’s paintings are the forerunners of our comic strips. Hogarth’s works are mostly satirical caricatures, sometimes bawdily sexual, which collectively give a picture of the London of his time in all its richness, depravity and pomposity.
Hogarth is perhaps best known for his series A Harlot’s Progress, A Rake’s Progress and Marriage A-la-Mode. The earliest of his series of “moral works” A Harlot’s Progress, was completed in 1731 and made him famous. This collection of six scenes depicts the fate of a country girl who becomes a prostitute. The scenes are chronological, starting with a meeting with a bawd and ending with a funeral ceremony that follows the character’s death from venereal disease.
This inaugural series was an immediate success and was followed in 1733–1735 by its sequel A Rake’s Progress. This consisted of eight pictures that depicted the reckless life of Tom Rakewell, the son of a rich merchant, who spends all of his money on luxurious living, services from prostitutes, and gambling before ending up in Bethlem Royal Hospital, the institution subsequently nicknamed Bedlam.
In 1743–1745, Hogarth painted the six pictures of Marriage A-la-Mode (now in the National Gallery in London), a pointed skewering of upper-class 18th-century society. This moralistic warning shows the miserable tragedy of an ill-considered marriage for money and is regarded by many as his finest project. This is a satire – a genre that by definition has a moral point to convey – of a conventional marriage within the English upper class. All the paintings were engraved and the series achieved wide circulation in print form.
Hogath’s storytelling artwork mocked political corruption, social vices, and upper-class greed, shaping modern British caricature and his leadership in the drive towards the Copyright Act of 1735.
Writing about Marriage A-la-Mode, the novelist William Makepeace William Makepeace Thackeray wrote:
“This famous set of pictures contains the most important and highly wrought of the Hogarth comedies. The care and method with which the moral grounds of these pictures are laid is as remarkable as the wit and skill of the observing and dexterous artist.”
This is a film about Hogarth’s work with commentary by historians Dr Angela McShane and Dan Cruikshank which analyses the pictures and engravings and shows us the details which nobody but an expert could find on their own