William Hogarth \u2013 Into The Streets of Georgian London<\/p>\n
A panel from Marriage-a-la-Mode<\/p>\n Click here to watch<\/a><\/p>\n William Hogarth, who died 262 years ago tomorrow, was by far the most significant English artist of his generation. Charles Lamb deemed Hogarth\u2019s images to be books, filled with \u201cthe teeming, fruitful, suggestive meaning of words. Other pictures we look at; his pictures we read.\u201d<\/p>\n Without denigrating their quality, which was of the first rank of realistic portraiture, I would not be the first to suggest that Hogarth\u2019s paintings are the forerunners of our comic strips. Hogarth\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Hogarth is perhaps best known for his series\u00a0A Harlot\u2019s Progress,\u00a0A Rake\u2019s Progress\u00a0and\u00a0Marriage A-la-Mode. The earliest of his series of \u201cmoral works\u201d\u00a0A Harlot\u2019s 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\u2019s death from venereal disease.<\/p>\n This inaugural series was an immediate success and was followed in 1733\u20131735 by its sequel\u00a0A Rake\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n In 1743\u20131745, Hogarth painted the six pictures of\u00a0Marriage A-la-Mode\u00a0(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 \u2013 a genre that by definition has a moral point to convey \u2013 of a conventional marriage within the English upper class. All the paintings were engraved and the series achieved wide circulation in print form.<\/p>\n Hogath\u2019s storytelling artwork mocked political corruption, social vices, and upper-class greed, shaping modern British caricature and his leadership in the drive towards the\u00a0Copyright Act of 1735<\/a>.<\/p>\n Writing about\u00a0Marriage A-la-Mode, the novelist William Makepeace William Makepeace Thackeray<\/a>\u00a0wrote: This is a film about Hogarth\u2019s work with commentary by historians\u00a0Dr Angela McShane\u00a0<\/a>and\u00a0Dan Cruikshank<\/a>\u00a0which analyses the pictures and engravings and shows us the details which nobody but an expert could find on their own<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"norman lebrecht October 31, 2026 From the leading arts substack William Hogarth \u2013 Into The Streets of Georgian…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":901904,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[228,226,227,229,88],"class_list":["post-901903","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-design","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/901903","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=901903"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/901903\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/901904"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=901903"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=901903"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=901903"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/ruthleon.substack.com\/p\/the-arts-online-oct-26-nov-1?img=https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fda8d6459-a085-4cd2-b29e-ea761ce1cce5_500x381.jpeg&open=false\")
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\u201cThis 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.\u201d<\/p>\n