Happy Saturday, everybody. Since William Hogarth got a name drop in this week's episode on Gin, we thought we would bring our episode on him out for Today's Saturday Classic. This one originally came out July Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frying and I'm Trac V. Wilson, and today we're going to talk about an artist. But his story really involves so much more than art. It involves satire and social criticism, and it even gets into some legislation for artist rights. But one thing we should point out is that his satire and social criticism was being made in the early seventeen hundreds when the society he was criticizing was very different than ours. It was debuted in a lot of ways. Yes, so there are a lot of things that are viewed very differently than we view them. Uh. There is discussion of of sex workers in this episode, not any details, but they come up in some of his prints, as well as some violence, some drug use, things like that come up. So just be aware that that's that's in the hopper and that it will be again based on on the views of England in the seventeen thirties and forties and fifties. Well, and especially because our artwork for this one is a self portrait of the artist with his dog, and it looks so sweet. It looks very sweet. And I was like, I could just see teachers saying, hey, this would be a great episode to share with the kids. Um, and it might be depending on the age of your kids, the kids you're thinking of, but you would want still, I think to frame it and kind of listen first, and uh, decide based on the actual content. But we're going to talk about William Hogarth, who was in English artist that as I said, uh, you know, his life story involves a lot more than just art. William Hogarth was born to Richard Hogarth and Anne Gibbons in London, England, on November tenth seven. He did have some siblings, although the tally's on those siblings very wildly. Uh. Richard Hogarth, William's father was a teacher and a classical scholar, and while he did have patrons, the family still struggled financially. Yeah. Hogarth later in his life would talk about how his dad had really been treated very poorly and he ended up in deep debts. Some accounts say that his father went to debtors prison, but I couldn't find a solid verification on that, but that does kind of inform some of his work going forward. And despite being the child of an educator, though William was pretty disinterested in formal education. He was really smart and he was curious, but even from a young age, he was more inclined to draw the to study texts. But it seemed that his father was not exactly sure what to do to help William find a path in life that would suit his interests. He wasn't against him pursuing art, but he didn't really know what to do with it. So William ended up looking for an apprenticeship. And this is another time where I will say there are some accounts that suggest that his father was in debtors prison and he had to get the apprenticeship, and others that say that he just knew his dad was not going to be much help in in finding him a career path, so he went and found one himself. At fifteen, he became a silversmith's apprentice and he learned engraving skills. But his master in this position might have hindered his development by giving him a mediocre instruction, and Hogarth, once again, frustrated that his mentors guidance was really lacking, opted to seek out information about the trade on his own. So he was augmenting this kind of weak training that he was getting with self guided study, and during his apprenticeship, Hogarth studied the world around him as much as his trade. He was definitely a fan of all of the various entertainments offered by early eighteenth century London, from theaters to body houses to coffee houses where intellectuals gathered. He sort of was one of those people I always think of as like a student of life. He just wanted to go around and see people doing all the things that people do and learn from that. When Hogarth was twenty three, he opened his own shop. In that same year he started taking formal drawing classes. But the normal curriculum for drawing lessons, which was sketching live models or prepared tableau and attempting to replicate other artists work, had the same effect on Hogarth as early attempts at his education had. He was not interested. We found it frustrating and limiting, and he had turned to drawing school to expand the possibilities of his engraving work, but he didn't think the classes were actually going to help him achieve that goal, and so he opted once again to rely on himself for his education, and he began to train his observational skills because he wanted to be able to draw real life subjects from memory. So he developed his own improvisational style over time, and simultaneously he was supporting himself through his regular engraving work. That work included projects like book illustration, so he was getting some practical experience in commercial art, but this was not particularly fulfilling. He would later say that the work quote did little more than maintain myself and the usual gaieties of life, but wasn't all a punctual paymaster. And it wasn't long though, before he found himself attracted once again to drawing school, but this time it was a little different. It was a school housed in the home of Sir James Thornhill. Thornhill was an accomplished artist. He had been the official history painter in the courts of George the First and George the Second, and he had been knighted in seventy He was also a member of Parliament. He painted in the Italian Baroque style, and Hogarth was a and of his work, and part of the appeal of studying under Thornhill was the fact that Thornhill had achieved a level of social standing that was unusual for an artist. He wasn't toiling penniless at the whim of a patron, although he was at odds with the neo classical revival that was underway at the time. In an effort to gain favor with Thornhill and make clear that he felt they were of the same mindset regarding art, Hogarth even published an engraving at the time titled Masquerades and Operas, which was a criticism of the trend to embrace foreign art above the art that was actually created in England. The engraving features, among other things, a fool and a devil leading a crowd into the theater to see the latest popular entertainment, while a woman with a wheelbarrow carries away all the writings of Congreve, Drieden, Otway, Shakespeare and Addison, and below the image is the following inscription, could new dumb faustus to reform the age conjure up Shakespeare's or Ben Johnson's Ghost. They'd blush for shame to see the English stage debauched by fooleryes at so great a cost. What would their main say should they behold monsters and masquerades, where useful plays adorned the fruitful theater of old and rival wits contended for the base. A copy of disngraving, which is known as The Bad Taste of the Town, was in the British Museum's collection and while it's not on display, it is digitized and available online and we will be linked in our show notes. Yeah. I feel like with all of Hogarth's work, we should mention that it's worth going and looking at it for yourself because we can describe it, and we will for a couple of them describe them. But uh, they're very busy. There is a lot going on in every single picture. Uh. And that's part of his social commentary that he includes things. And it's kind of like you will never fully grasp all of the sort of intensity of these these very very detailed pieces until you actually see them for yourself, So I encourage you to go look for them. Uh. And publishing masquerades and operas had long term ramifications for Hogarth's life and career. So the criticism of England's contemporary art and culture scene and the connoisseurs in it, of course earned him a number of enemies, and most prominent among them was the architect Richard Boyle, who was the third Earl of Burlington. He and others would kind of have this rivalry with uh Hogarth for the rest of his life, and it was not the first time in his early career that he would butt heads with art patrons. After several years of study with Thornhill, Hogarth believed he had learned enough that he should begin a painting career in Earnest. One of his first patrons was a tapestry maker named Joshua Morris, who had requested a painting from Hogarth, and when Hogarth delivered the art, Morris refused to accept it, claiming that Hogarth had not finished it and that it was apparent that the artist was really an engraver and not a professional painter. William Hogarth then sued Morris for his money and brought a number of expert witnesses to the trial, including Thornhill, to a test that yes, the work involved was a complete painting, and that Hogarth should be paid the money that he was owed. The court found in Hogarth's favor. Yeah, I think this is a time when artists were not so willing to really like pursue legal action when someone said, oh no, I don't want that painting after all, But he did. That will come up again in a little bit that he's willing to take legal action for his rightful money. Also in Segarth painted his first dated painting. Up to this point he had produced some plates and other things, but they didn't have dates on them. And this is the Beggar's Opera, And it was a recreation of a scene from a current production of the farctical play. And it was an example of just how well he had trained his memory to recall detail, because apparently, according to many people, he basically perfectly recreated the scene as it had played on the stage, even though he had of course gone away and painted it later. He actually ended up painting five different versions of the scene. Seventeen twenty nine, Hogarth and Thornhill's relationship took on a new dimension. William became Thornhill's son in law when he and Jane Thornhill eloped and in his early career, Hogarth became known for paintings known as conversation pieces, and these were portraits of small groups of people, depicting them in a casual, informal moment, like they're having a light conversation. And these also tended to be physically small paintings. And as Hogarth's conversation pieces became popular, they did afford him a degree of financial success, but he also started to find them really boring to work on, and this was in part because each individual piece didn't really bring in all that much money. He was a very quick worker, but he had to basically keep cranking them out at a rapid pace to keep money coming in. But even as he continued speedily cranking out these conversation pieces, he also worked on other projects for which he had greater enthusiasm. And these pieces were humorous, realistic scenes, and like masquerades and operas, these works often skewered social trends and preached morality. If they had been published as sequential art on a page, they would look very similar to comics and style, but they came out as full size prints, each one taking up an entire page of its own, and this was where he truly hit his stride as an artist. Yeah, this is really what made him famous, uh and what continues to make him sort of an important figure in the art world. And he was very savvy about the success that started to come with it, so much so that it did, as I mentioned, earliterally to some legislation. We're going to talk about all of that in just a moment, but first we will pause and have a little sponsor break. Whereas Hogarth's conversation pieces offered him financial stability, his moral satires brought in a great deal more money, so much so that he reached a point where he really had financial independence. He could work on the things that he chose to do, rather than depending on commissions or patronage to meet his own going financial needs. As prints of Hogress engravings were made to sell to a wider audience, he was aware of the risk that copycats could plagiarize his work, and that is because that had happened to him. He published a very popular series called A Harlot's Progress in seventeen thirty three, and the six paintings, which were then adapted into plates that made up A Harlot's Progress were produced at a time when the topic of prostitution and sex workers were the focus of a lot of attention in London. In the late seventeen twenties and early seventeen thirties, there was this effort on the part of city officials to bring morality back to London streets by working to eliminate or at least reduce the obvious appearance of prostitution. But out of the initial vilification of women that this sort of charge started, there was this secondary wave of characterization of women's sex workers that made them seem more like innocence who had been trapped by corruptors. And this was a debate that was going on in papers throughout London at the time, and Hogarth's engraving told a tale along the lines of that second characterization of an innocent who falls into this life through no desire of her own to pursue it. In the first plate, an innocent young woman named Mall hack About arrives in the city from the country, thinking she'll make her way in a trade such as dressmaking, but she's intercepted by a brothel keeper named Mother Needham, who has shown assessing Mall's attributes. And a second plate Mall has become a kept mistress living in luxury, but then she's caught cheating on her keeper, and by the third plate, Mall has been cast out by that keeper and has become a prostitute on the street. Uh and in plate four she has been imprisoned for that. In plate five she is once again a free woman, but at this point she has an illegitimate child, and she is dying from a sexually transmitted disease. Plate six is Mall's funeral, attended by women who also work in the sex trade, and men who appear to be more interested in taking advantage of those women than in mourning the dead person before them Mall. Even the parson in that final plate has his hand in the skirt of one of the other mourners. Because of the popularity of A. Harlot's Progress, fake copies were produced all over London by CD printers hoping to cash in on Hogarth's work, and naturally, the artist was incensed so much so that he took legal action. So, of course, it was not really feasible to chase down all of the various printers who had been making unlicensed copies of these popular plates. So William Hogarth, along with several other artists, went to Parliament and they made a case that their work should be legally protected. And after hearing the artists case, a piece of legislation called the Engravers Act was introduced in seventeen thirty four with language that would protect engravings that featured original designs, and it was signed into law on June seventeen thirty five, and it became known by the nickname Hogarth's Act. You'll sometimes also see it written as Hogarth's Law. While the Engravers Act was in legislation but not yet assigned law, William Hogarth actually had another series that he was ready to publish, but he was not willing to do so until there were legal protections in place to prevent pirated copies from circulating. And in the meantime, Hogarth's mentor and father in law, Thornhill, died in seventeen thirty four, and after the loss, Hogarth decided that he would reopen Thornhill's drawing school, which had never been a particularly successful venture. Hogarth's version became much more of a salon where artists shared ideas and discussed their work. Once the Engravers Act was law, Hogarth released the series he had been withholding, titled A Rake's Progress. The series, like A Harlot's Progress, was painted an oil first and then adapted as a set of print engravings. The rake in this narrative is Tom Rakewell, a young man of leisure. In the first scene, young Tom has freshly come into his fortune as his wealthy and apparently miserly there has died. Tom, wasting no time spending his new found money, is being fitted for a fancy new suit while simultaneously paying off a paramore who appears to be pregnant and heartbroken. She will appear in later plates as well. In scene too, Tom is surrounded in his home by an assortment of people, all vying for his attention in his financial favor. By the time the viewer sees Tom and the third scene, he has fully descended into a life of debauchery. He's in a brothel taking part in an orgy. And this is a good time to mention that in Hogarth's works on morality, even though sexual situations are conveyed, there's no nudity, but there is the suggestion of it. So to modernize the plate three looks like a wild party. It might take a moment for the viewer to actually register exactly what's going on. Yeah, he's you know, he is taking part in this big thing, but it's not overtly portrayed. I mean, once you start seeing the clues and you realize, like, oh, people's hands are in each other's clothes and stuff, but it's not quite so graphic as you might be envisioning. And in the fourth scene, Tom is about to be arrested for the debts that he's accrued in his debaucherous lifestyle, when that same young woman from the first plate that he bought off steps in and she pays the bailiff all of her money so that she can save him. And in the fifth scene, Tom is getting married, but not to that kind young woman who saved him though he had wronged her, but instead to an elderly heiress in the hopes of regaining a fortune in the match. The sixth image is a seedy scene. Tom is anna gambling den. The room is on fire, but neither Tom nor the other gambler's notice because they are so absorbed in the fortunes that they stand to gain or lose. Tom appears to be pleading to God for assistance in his bet, and Tom is pictured in Debtor's prison. In the seventh image in the series, he has written a play in the hopes of selling it to make some money. It's kind of sitting to the side, and his wife is pictured, that same woman that he married for her money, but at this point she has gaunt and clearly not the wealthy woman she once was. And the final scene shows Tom in the Bethlehem Royal Hospital known colloquially as Bedlam, where the insane and impoverished of London were sent, and he is naked at this point save for a ragged cloth that straped over him, and a wealthy woman who has come to see the spectacle of Bedlam, looks on. She has paid for admission to come and sort of observe the lower creatures in this horrible condition. This particular series was popular when it first appeared, and it's remained so in the centuries since. In ninety five, the story of Tom Rakewell was adapted into a ballet, became a film in nineteen forty five, and an opera by Igor Stravinsky in nineteen fifty one. The original painting series of A Rake's Progress was purchased at auction in eighteen o two by the wife architect Sir john Soon. Today they are part of the Sir john Son Museum collection. Unfortunately, the original paintings for A Harlot's Progress were lost in a fire in seventeen fifty five. Yeah, and A Rake's Progress. There have been even more modern adaptations and other works inspired by it, but those are the sort of the key points where in the more modern age it suddenly had this resurgence of interest. And both of these series of works, as well as others that he worked on during the seventeen thirties and seventeen forties and some in the seventies fifties, are filled with these details like I mentioned before, that add to the story and in some cases they make direct social or political commentary. In some cases he'll have pieces of art on the walls in the backgrounds that have meaning. And uh, some of the people that are depicted as supporting characters in these works were actually well known figures of London at the time. Sometimes they are cast in roles that make it clear that William Hogarth did not think very highly of them. Not long after the release of Our Rake's Progress, Hogarth was elected as one of the governors of Britain's oldest hospital, Saint Bartholomew's. He can we did to the decor of the facility by painting two large pieces for the main staircase, which were the historical paintings Pool of Bethesda and the Good Samaritan. Yeah, that hospital was founded, I believe in the eleven hundreds. Uh, And we're going to talk about the unique legacy of those two paintings there, but first we're gonna pause for a word from one of our fam sponsors. Those paintings in St. Bartholomew's, which are often mistaken for murals because they take up whole walls, but they are in fact canvases, are still in the hospital today and they have taken on sort of a unique role. In addition to acting as massive decor, the figures in those paintings are seven feet tall, so extrapolate from that how big like full scenes featuring people that size would be. They are also used in a really kind of interesting way as teaching tools. It's believed that Hogarth used patients from the hospital as his models for the paintings, in he captured their illnesses pretty accurately and without exaggeration, and as such, the characters in the paintings are sometimes introduced as topics of diagnosis discussion with medical students. Hogarth subjects display conditions which could be mayetonia, congenita and ricketts and syphilis and gout, among others, and so it's kind of an interesting way to um test and develop observational skills, which I think is just sort of fantastic to go, hey, what do you think this person in the painting has. While these two large scale historical paintings are not considered to be Hogarth's best work, they are an important part of the hospital's history because they are in an active space, they need constant upkeep, and his lifetime Hogarth covered the expenses to do so himself. He also requested that the two paintings never be varnished, though at some point that request was disregarded repeatedly. During a cleaning of the paintings in nineteen thirty seven, layers of varnish were carefully removed, and after his work on the same Bartholomew's Staircase project was complete, Hogarth turned to more traditional portraiture, and one of his first portraits in this period was a painting of philanthropist Thomas Corum, which he displayed at an orphan's hospital that Coream had founded, and he also convinced other artists to donate their work to the hospital when it was completed in seventeen forty five. His famous self portrait, The Painter and His Pug was created in seventeen forty five, and that same year he released another series called Marriage a la Mode and the exhibition description of Hogarth's work at the Tate Museum in two thousand and seven, it was described as follows, The satirical thrust of Marriage allah Mode is as much about patronage, aesthetics, and taste as it is about marriage and morals. Over and above the title itself, Marriage allah Mode includes Italian and Dutch old masters, French portraiture and furnishings, Oriental decorative arts, an Italian castrato singer and a French dancing master, a turbined black page boy, a masquerade reference, a banjo and an aristocratic toilet, and even syphilis, which Lord Squanderfield probably contracted abroad and was popularly known as the French pox. Thus his emasculated and diseased body is additionally emblematic of the spread of quote foreign culture that has infected and weakened British identity, society and commerce. And I wanted to include that because they so perfectly kind of encapsulated in that one paragraph a lot of the way that his his art worked in terms of how it would take people down with these little subtle clues about uh and not so subtle clues about what was going on in the picture and the people involved. So the story of marriage ala mode is that of an arranged marriage which leads to a life of idle distance between the couple involved and extramarital indulgences, both in terms of affairs and just debaucherous behavior otherwise, including drug use. So for Hogarth, who married for love and really seemed to have had a happy match with Jane Thornhill, marriage is arranged for financial benefits seemed to both loose of Chris and doomed. The late seventeen forties and early seventeen fifties saw a shift and Hogart's worth back to prince, but they were more basic images intended for mass market sales. He didn't start with paintings for those prints, but from drawings one of these series, titled The Four Stages of Cruelty, is a commentary on how unkind children can easily become violent adults. It depicts animal abuse in the first plate, and then the main character, Tom Nero, becomes progressively more a monster, culminating in m A. Cobb final scene in which the hanged Tom is being dissected for an anatomy lesson in the surgery. Yeah, that was one, I will confess. Uh, there are are debaucherous and sometimes unpleasant images in all of his work. That series really I found quite troubling. The animal abuse is really graphic, and then the things that sort of happened as this character becomes more and more of a lost person and a violent person are really a little effect surprisingly affecting to me for plates um, So if you go looking, just know that that's the case. At the same time that he was working on these simple morality prints, Hogarth was also painting, but he had reached this point where he was starting to struggle to finish any of his canvases. He actually staged two auctions of his work between seventeen forty five and seventeen fifty one, but these led to both frustration and embarrassment because they did not generate enough interest to really bring in much money. In seventeen fifty three, William Hogarth published a book titled The Analysis of Beauty, in which he laid out his principles of beauty and focused on the impart of what he called the line of beauty, an s shaped curve that's inherently appealing and exciting to the human eye. The book met with mixed reviews and was mocked by his detractors. Yeah, as we mentioned earlier, early in his career he made enemies and they stayed that way for the rest of his life. In seventeen fifty four, Hogarth produced another satirical series. This was known as the Election Series, which is a critique of electoral corruptions as told through a narrative detailing a political race in a fictional town called Guzzledown. And this series, which once again began his oil paintings and then was made into etchings, so he had had gone back to that after he had started doing the quicker drawings. Into etchings version skewered both the Tories and the Whigs for bribery and corrupt practices, and the first painting in the series actually went on display several days before the general election that year, at a time when election corruption was being discussed in every paper in London. And seventeen fifty seven Hogarth became Sergeant painter to King George the Third. But despite this prestigious and well paying position, his later years were really marked with disappointment. In seventeen fifty nine he painted Sigismunda Morning over the Heart of Guiscardo, which features the titles heroin holding a goblet containing the heart of her husband murdered by her father. The criticism of the work was severe and Hogarth did not paint much after that. Yeah, there are some write ups of that piece saying that he was trying to prove that English painters could produce work exactly as good as the Italian masters, and that the the reception was more of like a m hmmm, I don't think so. Uh. It did not go well. And he did make one other political statement with his anti war print series titled The Times, which he did after that, which made it rather unpopular statement in coming out against the Seven Years War. And at the time that that series was published, the war had not yet ended, so it was like in year six and did not have the name the Seven Years War. Yet people were outraged by this particular work, and politicians who supported the war vogally and publicly criticized Hogarth, and it only served to dampen his interest in his work. Hogarth's last artistic endeavor was an etching titled The Bathos or Manner of Sinking, which was published in March of seventeen sixty four. It's often described as having an air of doom in it. In it, time is depicted as a winged figure, broken and lying prone amid an assortment of debris, a puff of air escaping his lips, with the word Fini printed on it. The image was intended to be the tailpiece for bound collections of his work, and when considered in that context, it's a little bit less ominous. Yeah, it definitely looks like a death and destruction kind of image, but when you consider that it would be the end paper of a book where they're saying the book has ended, it seems a little less upset. But people will sometimes hint that it it was maybe important of his upcoming death. Uh So, a few months after the Bathos was created, in the summer of seventeen sixty four, William Hogarth had a seizure and he remained quite ill from that point until his death on October seventeen sixty four. And he was sixty seven at that point point and had been working as an engraver and artist for more than four decades. Today, not only can you find Hogarth's works and museums around the world, but you can also visit the house he lived in from seventeen forty nine until his Death's now a museum, and we will link to information about it in the show notes. Yeah, William Hogarth, He's fascinating creature. He's one of those artists. Like usually I will wax rapsodic about artists and kind of fall in love with them. And I was telling Tracy before this, I don't know how I feel about him, Like if I think he would be a delightful fun person or if he might be a crabby stick in the mud. I'm not sure. But some of his work is really lovely yea. So most art historians and critics will say, like if you look at his his satire pieces, because of their composition and what he included in, how um sort of rich unless they were those are are warranted as the things that make him famous. But if you just compare like his straight paintings to other painters at the time, he's line like not not particularly a big standout, and you wouldn't be like, wow, he was really amazing. Yeah, I saw some really interesting things that were about him trying to make it acceptable for anything to be the subject of art instead of just appropriate things being the subject of art. Yeah, that a lot of that came from that sort of bucking against the the established art society in the early seventeen hundreds, that he thought like, that's foolish. Nobody should control what should be art and what shouldn't be art and what's valid art and what is it? Which I completely get behind. Uh, But yeah, he's he's an interesting chapel. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook U r L or something similar over the course of the show that could be obsolete. Now. Our current email address is History Podcast hask at I Heart radio dot com. Our old house stuff works. Email at us no longer works, and you can find us all over social media at missed in History and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the I heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Happy Saturday, everybody. Since William Hogarth got a name drop in this week's episode on Gin, we thought we would bring our episode on him out for Today's Saturday Classic. This one originally came out July Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frying and I'm Trac V. Wilson, and today we're going to talk about an artist. But his story really involves so much more than art. It involves satire and social criticism, and it even gets into some legislation for artist rights. But one thing we should point out is that his satire and social criticism was being made in the early seventeen hundreds when the society he was criticizing was very different than ours. It was debuted in a lot of ways. Yes, so there are a lot of things that are viewed very differently than we view them. Uh. There is discussion of of sex workers in this episode, not any details, but they come up in some of his prints, as well as some violence, some drug use, things like that come up. So just be aware that that's that's in the hopper and that it will be again based on on the views of England in the seventeen thirties and forties and fifties. Well, and especially because our artwork for this one is a self portrait of the artist with his dog, and it looks so sweet. It looks very sweet. And I was like, I could just see teachers saying, hey, this would be a great episode to share with the kids. Um, and it might be depending on the age of your kids, the kids you're thinking of, but you would want still, I think to frame it and kind of listen first, and uh, decide based on the actual content. But we're going to talk about William Hogarth, who was in English artist that as I said, uh, you know, his life story involves a lot more than just art. William Hogarth was born to Richard Hogarth and Anne Gibbons in London, England, on November tenth seven. He did have some siblings, although the tally's on those siblings very wildly. Uh. Richard Hogarth, William's father was a teacher and a classical scholar, and while he did have patrons, the family still struggled financially. Yeah. Hogarth later in his life would talk about how his dad had really been treated very poorly and he ended up in deep debts. Some accounts say that his father went to debtors prison, but I couldn't find a solid verification on that, but that does kind of inform some of his work going forward. And despite being the child of an educator, though William was pretty disinterested in formal education. He was really smart and he was curious, but even from a young age, he was more inclined to draw the to study texts. But it seemed that his father was not exactly sure what to do to help William find a path in life that would suit his interests. He wasn't against him pursuing art, but he didn't really know what to do with it. So William ended up looking for an apprenticeship. And this is another time where I will say there are some accounts that suggest that his father was in debtors prison and he had to get the apprenticeship, and others that say that he just knew his dad was not going to be much help in in finding him a career path, so he went and found one himself. At fifteen, he became a silversmith's apprentice and he learned engraving skills. But his master in this position might have hindered his development by giving him a mediocre instruction, and Hogarth, once again, frustrated that his mentors guidance was really lacking, opted to seek out information about the trade on his own. So he was augmenting this kind of weak training that he was getting with self guided study, and during his apprenticeship, Hogarth studied the world around him as much as his trade. He was definitely a fan of all of the various entertainments offered by early eighteenth century London, from theaters to body houses to coffee houses where intellectuals gathered. He sort of was one of those people I always think of as like a student of life. He just wanted to go around and see people doing all the things that people do and learn from that. When Hogarth was twenty three, he opened his own shop. In that same year he started taking formal drawing classes. But the normal curriculum for drawing lessons, which was sketching live models or prepared tableau and attempting to replicate other artists work, had the same effect on Hogarth as early attempts at his education had. He was not interested. We found it frustrating and limiting, and he had turned to drawing school to expand the possibilities of his engraving work, but he didn't think the classes were actually going to help him achieve that goal, and so he opted once again to rely on himself for his education, and he began to train his observational skills because he wanted to be able to draw real life subjects from memory. So he developed his own improvisational style over time, and simultaneously he was supporting himself through his regular engraving work. That work included projects like book illustration, so he was getting some practical experience in commercial art, but this was not particularly fulfilling. He would later say that the work quote did little more than maintain myself and the usual gaieties of life, but wasn't all a punctual paymaster. And it wasn't long though, before he found himself attracted once again to drawing school, but this time it was a little different. It was a school housed in the home of Sir James Thornhill. Thornhill was an accomplished artist. He had been the official history painter in the courts of George the First and George the Second, and he had been knighted in seventy He was also a member of Parliament. He painted in the Italian Baroque style, and Hogarth was a and of his work, and part of the appeal of studying under Thornhill was the fact that Thornhill had achieved a level of social standing that was unusual for an artist. He wasn't toiling penniless at the whim of a patron, although he was at odds with the neo classical revival that was underway at the time. In an effort to gain favor with Thornhill and make clear that he felt they were of the same mindset regarding art, Hogarth even published an engraving at the time titled Masquerades and Operas, which was a criticism of the trend to embrace foreign art above the art that was actually created in England. The engraving features, among other things, a fool and a devil leading a crowd into the theater to see the latest popular entertainment, while a woman with a wheelbarrow carries away all the writings of Congreve, Drieden, Otway, Shakespeare and Addison, and below the image is the following inscription, could new dumb faustus to reform the age conjure up Shakespeare's or Ben Johnson's Ghost. They'd blush for shame to see the English stage debauched by fooleryes at so great a cost. What would their main say should they behold monsters and masquerades, where useful plays adorned the fruitful theater of old and rival wits contended for the base. A copy of disngraving, which is known as The Bad Taste of the Town, was in the British Museum's collection and while it's not on display, it is digitized and available online and we will be linked in our show notes. Yeah. I feel like with all of Hogarth's work, we should mention that it's worth going and looking at it for yourself because we can describe it, and we will for a couple of them describe them. But uh, they're very busy. There is a lot going on in every single picture. Uh. And that's part of his social commentary that he includes things. And it's kind of like you will never fully grasp all of the sort of intensity of these these very very detailed pieces until you actually see them for yourself, So I encourage you to go look for them. Uh. And publishing masquerades and operas had long term ramifications for Hogarth's life and career. So the criticism of England's contemporary art and culture scene and the connoisseurs in it, of course earned him a number of enemies, and most prominent among them was the architect Richard Boyle, who was the third Earl of Burlington. He and others would kind of have this rivalry with uh Hogarth for the rest of his life, and it was not the first time in his early career that he would butt heads with art patrons. After several years of study with Thornhill, Hogarth believed he had learned enough that he should begin a painting career in Earnest. One of his first patrons was a tapestry maker named Joshua Morris, who had requested a painting from Hogarth, and when Hogarth delivered the art, Morris refused to accept it, claiming that Hogarth had not finished it and that it was apparent that the artist was really an engraver and not a professional painter. William Hogarth then sued Morris for his money and brought a number of expert witnesses to the trial, including Thornhill, to a test that yes, the work involved was a complete painting, and that Hogarth should be paid the money that he was owed. The court found in Hogarth's favor. Yeah, I think this is a time when artists were not so willing to really like pursue legal action when someone said, oh no, I don't want that painting after all, But he did. That will come up again in a little bit that he's willing to take legal action for his rightful money. Also in Segarth painted his first dated painting. Up to this point he had produced some plates and other things, but they didn't have dates on them. And this is the Beggar's Opera, And it was a recreation of a scene from a current production of the farctical play. And it was an example of just how well he had trained his memory to recall detail, because apparently, according to many people, he basically perfectly recreated the scene as it had played on the stage, even though he had of course gone away and painted it later. He actually ended up painting five different versions of the scene. Seventeen twenty nine, Hogarth and Thornhill's relationship took on a new dimension. William became Thornhill's son in law when he and Jane Thornhill eloped and in his early career, Hogarth became known for paintings known as conversation pieces, and these were portraits of small groups of people, depicting them in a casual, informal moment, like they're having a light conversation. And these also tended to be physically small paintings. And as Hogarth's conversation pieces became popular, they did afford him a degree of financial success, but he also started to find them really boring to work on, and this was in part because each individual piece didn't really bring in all that much money. He was a very quick worker, but he had to basically keep cranking them out at a rapid pace to keep money coming in. But even as he continued speedily cranking out these conversation pieces, he also worked on other projects for which he had greater enthusiasm. And these pieces were humorous, realistic scenes, and like masquerades and operas, these works often skewered social trends and preached morality. If they had been published as sequential art on a page, they would look very similar to comics and style, but they came out as full size prints, each one taking up an entire page of its own, and this was where he truly hit his stride as an artist. Yeah, this is really what made him famous, uh and what continues to make him sort of an important figure in the art world. And he was very savvy about the success that started to come with it, so much so that it did, as I mentioned, earliterally to some legislation. We're going to talk about all of that in just a moment, but first we will pause and have a little sponsor break. Whereas Hogarth's conversation pieces offered him financial stability, his moral satires brought in a great deal more money, so much so that he reached a point where he really had financial independence. He could work on the things that he chose to do, rather than depending on commissions or patronage to meet his own going financial needs. As prints of Hogress engravings were made to sell to a wider audience, he was aware of the risk that copycats could plagiarize his work, and that is because that had happened to him. He published a very popular series called A Harlot's Progress in seventeen thirty three, and the six paintings, which were then adapted into plates that made up A Harlot's Progress were produced at a time when the topic of prostitution and sex workers were the focus of a lot of attention in London. In the late seventeen twenties and early seventeen thirties, there was this effort on the part of city officials to bring morality back to London streets by working to eliminate or at least reduce the obvious appearance of prostitution. But out of the initial vilification of women that this sort of charge started, there was this secondary wave of characterization of women's sex workers that made them seem more like innocence who had been trapped by corruptors. And this was a debate that was going on in papers throughout London at the time, and Hogarth's engraving told a tale along the lines of that second characterization of an innocent who falls into this life through no desire of her own to pursue it. In the first plate, an innocent young woman named Mall hack About arrives in the city from the country, thinking she'll make her way in a trade such as dressmaking, but she's intercepted by a brothel keeper named Mother Needham, who has shown assessing Mall's attributes. And a second plate Mall has become a kept mistress living in luxury, but then she's caught cheating on her keeper, and by the third plate, Mall has been cast out by that keeper and has become a prostitute on the street. Uh and in plate four she has been imprisoned for that. In plate five she is once again a free woman, but at this point she has an illegitimate child, and she is dying from a sexually transmitted disease. Plate six is Mall's funeral, attended by women who also work in the sex trade, and men who appear to be more interested in taking advantage of those women than in mourning the dead person before them Mall. Even the parson in that final plate has his hand in the skirt of one of the other mourners. Because of the popularity of A. Harlot's Progress, fake copies were produced all over London by CD printers hoping to cash in on Hogarth's work, and naturally, the artist was incensed so much so that he took legal action. So, of course, it was not really feasible to chase down all of the various printers who had been making unlicensed copies of these popular plates. So William Hogarth, along with several other artists, went to Parliament and they made a case that their work should be legally protected. And after hearing the artists case, a piece of legislation called the Engravers Act was introduced in seventeen thirty four with language that would protect engravings that featured original designs, and it was signed into law on June seventeen thirty five, and it became known by the nickname Hogarth's Act. You'll sometimes also see it written as Hogarth's Law. While the Engravers Act was in legislation but not yet assigned law, William Hogarth actually had another series that he was ready to publish, but he was not willing to do so until there were legal protections in place to prevent pirated copies from circulating. And in the meantime, Hogarth's mentor and father in law, Thornhill, died in seventeen thirty four, and after the loss, Hogarth decided that he would reopen Thornhill's drawing school, which had never been a particularly successful venture. Hogarth's version became much more of a salon where artists shared ideas and discussed their work. Once the Engravers Act was law, Hogarth released the series he had been withholding, titled A Rake's Progress. The series, like A Harlot's Progress, was painted an oil first and then adapted as a set of print engravings. The rake in this narrative is Tom Rakewell, a young man of leisure. In the first scene, young Tom has freshly come into his fortune as his wealthy and apparently miserly there has died. Tom, wasting no time spending his new found money, is being fitted for a fancy new suit while simultaneously paying off a paramore who appears to be pregnant and heartbroken. She will appear in later plates as well. In scene too, Tom is surrounded in his home by an assortment of people, all vying for his attention in his financial favor. By the time the viewer sees Tom and the third scene, he has fully descended into a life of debauchery. He's in a brothel taking part in an orgy. And this is a good time to mention that in Hogarth's works on morality, even though sexual situations are conveyed, there's no nudity, but there is the suggestion of it. So to modernize the plate three looks like a wild party. It might take a moment for the viewer to actually register exactly what's going on. Yeah, he's you know, he is taking part in this big thing, but it's not overtly portrayed. I mean, once you start seeing the clues and you realize, like, oh, people's hands are in each other's clothes and stuff, but it's not quite so graphic as you might be envisioning. And in the fourth scene, Tom is about to be arrested for the debts that he's accrued in his debaucherous lifestyle, when that same young woman from the first plate that he bought off steps in and she pays the bailiff all of her money so that she can save him. And in the fifth scene, Tom is getting married, but not to that kind young woman who saved him though he had wronged her, but instead to an elderly heiress in the hopes of regaining a fortune in the match. The sixth image is a seedy scene. Tom is anna gambling den. The room is on fire, but neither Tom nor the other gambler's notice because they are so absorbed in the fortunes that they stand to gain or lose. Tom appears to be pleading to God for assistance in his bet, and Tom is pictured in Debtor's prison. In the seventh image in the series, he has written a play in the hopes of selling it to make some money. It's kind of sitting to the side, and his wife is pictured, that same woman that he married for her money, but at this point she has gaunt and clearly not the wealthy woman she once was. And the final scene shows Tom in the Bethlehem Royal Hospital known colloquially as Bedlam, where the insane and impoverished of London were sent, and he is naked at this point save for a ragged cloth that straped over him, and a wealthy woman who has come to see the spectacle of Bedlam, looks on. She has paid for admission to come and sort of observe the lower creatures in this horrible condition. This particular series was popular when it first appeared, and it's remained so in the centuries since. In ninety five, the story of Tom Rakewell was adapted into a ballet, became a film in nineteen forty five, and an opera by Igor Stravinsky in nineteen fifty one. The original painting series of A Rake's Progress was purchased at auction in eighteen o two by the wife architect Sir john Soon. Today they are part of the Sir john Son Museum collection. Unfortunately, the original paintings for A Harlot's Progress were lost in a fire in seventeen fifty five. Yeah, and A Rake's Progress. There have been even more modern adaptations and other works inspired by it, but those are the sort of the key points where in the more modern age it suddenly had this resurgence of interest. And both of these series of works, as well as others that he worked on during the seventeen thirties and seventeen forties and some in the seventies fifties, are filled with these details like I mentioned before, that add to the story and in some cases they make direct social or political commentary. In some cases he'll have pieces of art on the walls in the backgrounds that have meaning. And uh, some of the people that are depicted as supporting characters in these works were actually well known figures of London at the time. Sometimes they are cast in roles that make it clear that William Hogarth did not think very highly of them. Not long after the release of Our Rake's Progress, Hogarth was elected as one of the governors of Britain's oldest hospital, Saint Bartholomew's. He can we did to the decor of the facility by painting two large pieces for the main staircase, which were the historical paintings Pool of Bethesda and the Good Samaritan. Yeah, that hospital was founded, I believe in the eleven hundreds. Uh, And we're going to talk about the unique legacy of those two paintings there, but first we're gonna pause for a word from one of our fam sponsors. Those paintings in St. Bartholomew's, which are often mistaken for murals because they take up whole walls, but they are in fact canvases, are still in the hospital today and they have taken on sort of a unique role. In addition to acting as massive decor, the figures in those paintings are seven feet tall, so extrapolate from that how big like full scenes featuring people that size would be. They are also used in a really kind of interesting way as teaching tools. It's believed that Hogarth used patients from the hospital as his models for the paintings, in he captured their illnesses pretty accurately and without exaggeration, and as such, the characters in the paintings are sometimes introduced as topics of diagnosis discussion with medical students. Hogarth subjects display conditions which could be mayetonia, congenita and ricketts and syphilis and gout, among others, and so it's kind of an interesting way to um test and develop observational skills, which I think is just sort of fantastic to go, hey, what do you think this person in the painting has. While these two large scale historical paintings are not considered to be Hogarth's best work, they are an important part of the hospital's history because they are in an active space, they need constant upkeep, and his lifetime Hogarth covered the expenses to do so himself. He also requested that the two paintings never be varnished, though at some point that request was disregarded repeatedly. During a cleaning of the paintings in nineteen thirty seven, layers of varnish were carefully removed, and after his work on the same Bartholomew's Staircase project was complete, Hogarth turned to more traditional portraiture, and one of his first portraits in this period was a painting of philanthropist Thomas Corum, which he displayed at an orphan's hospital that Coream had founded, and he also convinced other artists to donate their work to the hospital when it was completed in seventeen forty five. His famous self portrait, The Painter and His Pug was created in seventeen forty five, and that same year he released another series called Marriage a la Mode and the exhibition description of Hogarth's work at the Tate Museum in two thousand and seven, it was described as follows, The satirical thrust of Marriage allah Mode is as much about patronage, aesthetics, and taste as it is about marriage and morals. Over and above the title itself, Marriage allah Mode includes Italian and Dutch old masters, French portraiture and furnishings, Oriental decorative arts, an Italian castrato singer and a French dancing master, a turbined black page boy, a masquerade reference, a banjo and an aristocratic toilet, and even syphilis, which Lord Squanderfield probably contracted abroad and was popularly known as the French pox. Thus his emasculated and diseased body is additionally emblematic of the spread of quote foreign culture that has infected and weakened British identity, society and commerce. And I wanted to include that because they so perfectly kind of encapsulated in that one paragraph a lot of the way that his his art worked in terms of how it would take people down with these little subtle clues about uh and not so subtle clues about what was going on in the picture and the people involved. So the story of marriage ala mode is that of an arranged marriage which leads to a life of idle distance between the couple involved and extramarital indulgences, both in terms of affairs and just debaucherous behavior otherwise, including drug use. So for Hogarth, who married for love and really seemed to have had a happy match with Jane Thornhill, marriage is arranged for financial benefits seemed to both loose of Chris and doomed. The late seventeen forties and early seventeen fifties saw a shift and Hogart's worth back to prince, but they were more basic images intended for mass market sales. He didn't start with paintings for those prints, but from drawings one of these series, titled The Four Stages of Cruelty, is a commentary on how unkind children can easily become violent adults. It depicts animal abuse in the first plate, and then the main character, Tom Nero, becomes progressively more a monster, culminating in m A. Cobb final scene in which the hanged Tom is being dissected for an anatomy lesson in the surgery. Yeah, that was one, I will confess. Uh, there are are debaucherous and sometimes unpleasant images in all of his work. That series really I found quite troubling. The animal abuse is really graphic, and then the things that sort of happened as this character becomes more and more of a lost person and a violent person are really a little effect surprisingly affecting to me for plates um, So if you go looking, just know that that's the case. At the same time that he was working on these simple morality prints, Hogarth was also painting, but he had reached this point where he was starting to struggle to finish any of his canvases. He actually staged two auctions of his work between seventeen forty five and seventeen fifty one, but these led to both frustration and embarrassment because they did not generate enough interest to really bring in much money. In seventeen fifty three, William Hogarth published a book titled The Analysis of Beauty, in which he laid out his principles of beauty and focused on the impart of what he called the line of beauty, an s shaped curve that's inherently appealing and exciting to the human eye. The book met with mixed reviews and was mocked by his detractors. Yeah, as we mentioned earlier, early in his career he made enemies and they stayed that way for the rest of his life. In seventeen fifty four, Hogarth produced another satirical series. This was known as the Election Series, which is a critique of electoral corruptions as told through a narrative detailing a political race in a fictional town called Guzzledown. And this series, which once again began his oil paintings and then was made into etchings, so he had had gone back to that after he had started doing the quicker drawings. Into etchings version skewered both the Tories and the Whigs for bribery and corrupt practices, and the first painting in the series actually went on display several days before the general election that year, at a time when election corruption was being discussed in every paper in London. And seventeen fifty seven Hogarth became Sergeant painter to King George the Third. But despite this prestigious and well paying position, his later years were really marked with disappointment. In seventeen fifty nine he painted Sigismunda Morning over the Heart of Guiscardo, which features the titles heroin holding a goblet containing the heart of her husband murdered by her father. The criticism of the work was severe and Hogarth did not paint much after that. Yeah, there are some write ups of that piece saying that he was trying to prove that English painters could produce work exactly as good as the Italian masters, and that the the reception was more of like a m hmmm, I don't think so. Uh. It did not go well. And he did make one other political statement with his anti war print series titled The Times, which he did after that, which made it rather unpopular statement in coming out against the Seven Years War. And at the time that that series was published, the war had not yet ended, so it was like in year six and did not have the name the Seven Years War. Yet people were outraged by this particular work, and politicians who supported the war vogally and publicly criticized Hogarth, and it only served to dampen his interest in his work. Hogarth's last artistic endeavor was an etching titled The Bathos or Manner of Sinking, which was published in March of seventeen sixty four. It's often described as having an air of doom in it. In it, time is depicted as a winged figure, broken and lying prone amid an assortment of debris, a puff of air escaping his lips, with the word Fini printed on it. The image was intended to be the tailpiece for bound collections of his work, and when considered in that context, it's a little bit less ominous. Yeah, it definitely looks like a death and destruction kind of image, but when you consider that it would be the end paper of a book where they're saying the book has ended, it seems a little less upset. But people will sometimes hint that it it was maybe important of his upcoming death. Uh So, a few months after the Bathos was created, in the summer of seventeen sixty four, William Hogarth had a seizure and he remained quite ill from that point until his death on October seventeen sixty four. And he was sixty seven at that point point and had been working as an engraver and artist for more than four decades. Today, not only can you find Hogarth's works and museums around the world, but you can also visit the house he lived in from seventeen forty nine until his Death's now a museum, and we will link to information about it in the show notes. Yeah, William Hogarth, He's fascinating creature. He's one of those artists. Like usually I will wax rapsodic about artists and kind of fall in love with them. And I was telling Tracy before this, I don't know how I feel about him, Like if I think he would be a delightful fun person or if he might be a crabby stick in the mud. I'm not sure. But some of his work is really lovely yea. So most art historians and critics will say, like if you look at his his satire pieces, because of their composition and what he included in, how um sort of rich unless they were those are are warranted as the things that make him famous. But if you just compare like his straight paintings to other painters at the time, he's line like not not particularly a big standout, and you wouldn't be like, wow, he was really amazing. Yeah, I saw some really interesting things that were about him trying to make it acceptable for anything to be the subject of art instead of just appropriate things being the subject of art. Yeah, that a lot of that came from that sort of bucking against the the established art society in the early seventeen hundreds, that he thought like, that's foolish. Nobody should control what should be art and what shouldn't be art and what's valid art and what is it? Which I completely get behind. Uh, But yeah, he's he's an interesting chapel. 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