Which English Artist Is Best Known For His Satirical Paintings Of The English Middle Class?

The Bench (1758)
Fitzwilliam Museum.
One of Hogarth's many
caricature portraits.

THE ENGLISH Schoolhouse
For information and facts about
famous artists from England, see:
Richard Wilson (1714-82)
Outset top English landscape painter
Joshua Reynolds (1723-92)
Portraitist, President Purple Academy
George Stubbs (1724-1806)
Finest equestrian painter

English Art: Beginning of the 18th Century

The significance of the bang-up English engraver and painter William Hogarth requires a picayune introduction on the state of English art at the outset of the 18th century.

The death of Sir Godfrey Kneller in 1723 brought to an stop the long dynasty of foreign artists which had dominated English language painting for two hundred years, just no sign was yet to be seen of that revival which has fabricated the eighteenth century so glorious a chapter in the history of English art.

Kneller'due south pupils and followers were conventional 'portrait manufacturers', whose work had neither life nor charm. He was succeeded as serjeant-painter to the king by Charles Jervas (1675-1739), a typical member of his school, memorable more for his conceit and for his friendship with Pope, whose polite verses to Jervas exercise more credit to his friendship than to his critical judgment. Jervas, still, was not the best of the painters of Kneller's school. Michael Dahl (1656-1743) and Jonathan Richardson (1665-1745), though little more imitators, were painters of a somewhat higher lodge, and Sir James Thornhill (1676-1734) made a gallant, if not very successful, effort to heighten English figurative painting out of the ruck into which it had fallen.

TOP PAINTERS IN ENGLAND
For a list of the near important
portraitist, history painters and
landscape artists in oils and
watercolours, during the
eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, (1700-1900) run into:
Best English language Painters.

PRINTMAKING
For more than about types of
fine art printing, used by
artists similar William Hogarth
including engraving, etching,
lithographic and silkscreen
methods, see:
Printmaking: History, Types.

AESTHETICS
For a discussion about the
meaning and defintion of art,
run into: What is Fine art?

But it was left to his educatee and son-in-law, William Hogarth, to restore English fine art painting to dignity and honour. It is useless to try to account for the sudden appearance of genius at a given fourth dimension and place, and that Hogarth, Reynolds, Gainsborough, Wilson, Turner, Constable, and a score of other great artists appeared in England within a hundred years can only be accepted every bit a fact. Simply conditions were changing, and the circumstances of the eighteenth century were far more favourable to the growth of a national schoolhouse than those of the sixteenth and seventeenth.

Widening of English Culture Base of operations

The religious and political dissensions which had followed the intermission with medieval tradition, added to the maladministration of the Stuart kings, and the comparative poverty of the country, had given little opportunity for the spread of general culture in England during the seventeenth century. But with the eighteenth century came internal peace, stable authorities, a steady increment in the nation'southward wealth, and a consequent widening of the bases of culture.

Patronage, which had been bars mainly to the Court and aristocracy, was extended to a wealthy upper and upper-middle class, whose taste was enriched by travel. The "One thousand Tour" of France, Italy, and Frg became part of the general education of a young man of moderate means, and a knowledge of the works of the old masters became disseminated among a much wider class in England. The long years of Walpole's administration were a period of residuum and recuperation, during which the English people acquired solidity and a growing sense of unity and patriotism which had not notwithstanding degenerated into the extreme insularity of subsequently times. National pride was quickened by the artistic glories of other countries, and a want for a national school was awakened. The works of Claude, Poussin, and the Dutch realist masters angry a taste for landscape, which opened a fashion for the English mural-painters, whose work in the early nineteenth century was to transform the face of European art.

In the eighteenth century, too, schools of art came into existence, societies of artists were formed, and public exhibitions of their work were held for the first time, and finally the Royal Academy of Arts in London was founded in 1768 under the auspices of George 3.

All these factors combined to raise the general level of the arts, although some of them ultimately had evil as well as good effects.

Since the foundation of the Purple Academy, the fortunes of English art have been very closely bound upward with it, and the Majestic Academy Schools, yet much their methods of tuition may have been open to criticism, have been the principal nursery of artists in England. Only at the beginning of the century the but schools were the studios of the portrait-painters, and these, though the purely technical grooming in them was probably skillful, had only a debased tradition to manus on to their pupils. It was in one of these studios, that of Thomas Highmore, that Sir James Thornhill was trained, and he had already made some reputation equally a portrait-painter, when a journey through French republic, Flemish region, and Holland turned his attention to decorative painting. On his return he devoted himself to this branch of art, and to an attempt to raise the standard of painting in England. Besides carrying out large schemes of ornament, the most important of which are those in St. Paul's, Greenwich Hospital, and Hampton Court, he formed an Academy of Art in Covent Garden.

That Thornhill had real gifts is proved by the sketch for a decoration, "A phenomenon of St. Francis", in the National Gallery, in which the flashing rectangles of the design actually call up the art of Tintoretto. But earlier English painting could brand a fresh get-go information technology was necessary to get back to something simpler and more sincere. The work of Rubens and the afterward Italian painters was the concluding consequence of a long process in which their elaborate and cultivated art had slowly developed from simpler forms based on a sincere written report of nature. To imitate their results without the solid basis on which they were congenital, was but to produce artificial flowers without life and without seed. It was considering the art of Hogarth had roots securely stuck in the life of his own fourth dimension and his ain people that he was able to restore health and vigour to the sickly stem of English painting.

William Hogarth: Early Life, His Approach to Fine art

William Hogarth, the son of a schoolmaster and literary hack, was born at Ship Court, Old Bailey in 1697. About 1712 his father apprenticed him to Ellis Adventure, a silversmith in Cranbourne Alley, Leicester Fields, from whom he learned something of the processes of engraving, and acquired a steadiness of manus and practice in design which were more valuable to him than the studio tricks which he would accept picked upwards from one of the fashionable portrait-painters. He took to drawing, it is said, because he wished to record the humours of London life as he saw it, and he devised a system of cartoon by memory, in which he could note downward in the evening the things seen during the mean solar day, which had impressed and amused him.

This was surely the right way for him to brainstorm. His artistic language grew out of his thoughts, and he drew because he had something to say instead of learning an elaborate and artificial way which corresponded to no realities in his own heed. This is the just way in which a living art can be produced, for merely as in speech the words must accurately fit the idea, and then in the visual arts the class must be the appropriate clothing to an image in the mind. Here lies the difficulty in learning from strange schools. Style is only vital and expressive when information technology is exactly informed by the indwelling spirit, and the artistic linguistic communication which has been evolved from the customs, traditions, and habits of idea of one people cannot be made to fit those of another. In Hogarth's twenty-four hours, despite a vibrant English language, there was no equivalent system of symbolism set for his employ in the practice of painting, and then he was forced to create ane for himself.

A human of less dogged, pugnacious, and cocky-confident temper than Hogarth would have failed, but he had just the qualities to enable him to resist the stylish superficialities of the 24-hour interval, and to be determinedly and insolently himself. Portraits of him show a bullet-headed human with an alert eye, a pugnacious nose, a firm mouth, and altogether something of the look of a Cockney prize-fighter who could accept and give punishment. Of course in that location was much more in the man than that, and underneath all his satire, impudence, and humour in that location lurked the English poetry, sentiment, and love of a tender dazzler, but information technology was the harder qualities which gave him the ability to practice what he did for English painting.

Early on Works

In 1718, his apprenticeship to Ellis Gamble over, he found employment in engraving coats of arms and shop bills, his primeval known work beingness his own engraved carte, "W. Hogarth, engraver, Apr 23rd 1720". From this piece of work he went on to book analogy, and in 1724 published the "Burlington Gate", the first of his original satires.

In the aforementioned year Sir James Thornhill's Academy at Covent Garden was opened, and Hogarth attended it to larn the arts and crafts of oil-painting, and in the form of a few years he had begun to establish himself equally a painter. His plates to Butler'southward Hudibras in 1726 had already brought him some professional reputation as an engraver. His earliest paintings were small portrait groups or "conversation pieces", every bit they were called, and from them he proceeded to the various series of satirical moralities with which his name is mainly associated. The first of these, "The Harlot'southward Progress", was painted in 1731.

Meanwhile changes in his private life had been taking place. In 1729 he eloped with the daughter of Sir James Thornhill, and in 1733 he settled in Leicester Fields, where he remained for the rest of his life. From this time on his life is mainly a chronicle of work, just in 1748, in one of the rare intervals of peace, he made a memorable journeying to France, which bore fruit in the picture show of "Calais Gate", now in the National Gallery. While making a sketch of the old gateway Hogarth was arrested on a charge of espionage and, though subsequently released, the incident had the effect of confirming his truculent insularity which finds full vent in this moving-picture show.

Hogarth contrived to the end of his life to produce satirical engravings and paintings, but he too painted a fairly large number of portraits, and a few pictures in the "thousand historical manner", which are non on a level with his other piece of work. Tardily in life he published his "Analysis of Beauty", in which he expressed his own artful ideals, and endeavoured to establish a definite canon of taste. In 1757 he received some official recognition in his appointment equally serjeant-painter to the king, merely he died on 26th October 1764, four years too early to become i of the foundation members of the Majestic Academy.

Hogarth's Artworks: Influences

Hogarth's work, disregarding the distinction between oil-painting and engraving, falls naturally into four categories: conversation pieces, satirical moralities, portraits, and historical paintings. In all of these, except the final, for which he had neither the natural gifts nor the education, he showed a vigour, originality, and inventiveness which owed very lilliputian to the art of others. If whatsoever affinities are to be establish, they are with some aspects of the fine art of Venice and Flanders rather than with his contemporaries and predecessors in England. But from the starting time to the end of his career he was consistently himself, and such likenesses as are to exist plant in his piece of work to Pieter Brueghel, Canaletto, and Longhi are probably adventitious. If he borrowed at all, it was but what was exactly suited to the needs of his personal expression, and it became an integral part of his ain work.

Technically his painting was in the Kneller tradition, and this was a audio one of fluent direct paint, just certain almost calligraphic passages of very liquid paint propose that on the technical side only he may have owed something to Canaletto, who came to England in 1745. The piece of work of Canaletto was known in England before that, and it is at least possible that Hogarth may accept studied it. That Hogarth knew the work of "Old Brueghel" is highly improbable, but there is a clear affinity betwixt them. The connecting link, no doubt, is to be found in the Dutch and Flemish low-life painters of the seventeenth century, some of whose work Hogarth would have known. This is a case of a living tradition, which having begun with Brueghel, blossomed again when it came to the hand of another great artist. Hogarth'due south range was, of form, far more restricted than Brueghel's, and there is cypher in his fine art to compare with the great landscapes at the shut of Brueghel's life, just as a satirist, Hogarth had a more than subtle and penetrating wit, and his work is informed by a kind of moral indignation which had no part in the peasant buffooneries of Brueghel. What they have in common is the straight reaction of a potent and humorous spirit to the foibles and grotesqueness of life as they saw it, and the ability to requite a formal significance to their comments which redeems them from being just painted jokes.

Satirical Works

Hogarth was never a caricaturist, and he never falls into the fault of making the characters in his satire mere personifications of some vice or virtue. With all the teeming fecundity of his grotesque invention he never loses sight of reality and, however much his characters may be given over to avarice, drunkenness, or gluttony, they remain human beings with other potentialities of vice or virtue. They are conceived in the circular, and not as invariable paper-thin profiles. In contrast to many English artists Hogarth had a prodigal creativity, not only of grotesque types and incidents. These, indeed, are rich and varied as life itself, just he is equally inventive in the formal blueprint of his pictures.

Conversation Pieces

These qualities are best seen in his satirical paintings, engravings and etchings, but even in the small chat pieces, with which he began his career as a painter, they are to be found. The way for these small intimate family unit groups had been set by some of the Dutch piffling masters, whose pictures were well known in England, and in some ways Hogarth was well equipped for such work. His sense of character, keen observation, and gift of dramatic grouping were here very much to the point, but his sense of humour, which he could only indulge slyly, must have been something of a handicap to him. In these pictures his sense of character and humour are both rather cramped, and the edge of his wit is blunted, and they appeal to i as often every bit not through that chemical element of the ridiculous which has crept in unawares quite as much as by the perfect fulfilment of the weather of this difficult genre. However even in these, Hogarth shows a great superiority to the works of contemporary painters, such as Joseph Highmore.

Satirical Morality Pictures

Hogarth must have felt the cramping limitations of this genre himself, for he soon turned from conversation pieces to the various series of moralities, such as "The Harlot's Progress", "The Rake's Progress", and "Marriage a la Mode" (National Gallery London), in which his private powers had much greater telescopic, though the purely story-telling chemical element in them sometimes a little obscures his gifts as a draughtsman, colourist, and designer.

Midway between the conversation pieces and the satires stand up his theatrical pictures, such as his theatre interior during a performance of the Beggar's Opera (Tate Gallery). These pictures give a inkling to some of the qualities of his work, which in no bad sense is rather theatrical. Indeed, the theatre influenced his work far more than any painter living or dead.

His pictures are conceived as stage scenes or tableaux set confronting a more or less conventional back-textile, without any endeavor at exact realism of lighting or atmosphere. His aims were entirely dramatic, and the stage supplied him with a prepare of conventions which enabled him to give a concentrated force to his delineations of character and action.

Fashion and Composition

He was not a realist, but a creator, and life in his pictures is not presented in its rough class. The raw textile of his fine art, the life of his own time, has in its passage through his brain become formalized, stylized, and transmuted to the aureate of his own cosmos. If he had been content with realism, he would have been able to cram into his work far less meaning than he did and, modern ideas notwithstanding, nosotros must recognize that Hogarth'southward firsthand aim in these pictures was to tell a story with a moral, and that the aesthetic qualities were subordinate to his main purpose and grow from it. To brand his characters tell the story as conspicuously and emphatically every bit possible he employs poses, gestures, and groupings which are more than merely natural, and he invented a form for his picture which is most virtually comparable to the course of the ballet, in which activity is stylized to give the utmost expressiveness within the limits of the medium.

The mode in which Hogarth deals with these limitations and creates from them positive virtues is what gives these literary pictures their artful significance. In overcoming the limitations which immobility and lack of speech communication impose upon his figures equally actors, he was forced to the invention of witty gestures and poses which in life would be over-emphatic, but which in the make-believe world of his pictures are entirely natural and appropriate. Just every bit on the stage itself pure realism is flat and ineffective, and conventions are necessary to convey the illusion of reality, so Hogarth creates his illusion while constantly violating the canons of strict realism. When nosotros examine his pictures inch by inch nosotros find that they are total of clues to the story, and that they tin can be read as well as looked at. If he had only been able to convey his meaning in this way his pictures might rightly be dismissed as but literary art, but, as information technology is, the very shapes and colours themselves are informed by a wit and satire which mould them to a formal arabesque.

Portraits

Behind all this creative ingenuity there lies a very uncomplicated and manly morality which is its mainspring. In an historic period of lewdness, casuistry, and corruption Hogarth stands for the elementary virtues of honesty, sobriety, and decent dear, and it is this simplicity of sentiment which has given his pictures the wide popular entreatment of old-fashioned melodrama, of Dickens, or of Shakespeare. Vice and virtue are clear cut in his pictures, and he has the same relish and gusto for a good villain that has marked the not bad popular artists of all fourth dimension. He enjoys his villains with the zest of Shakespeare in Iago, or the medieval artists in their devils. In his portraits these traits find less telescopic as a rule, but in ane of them, "Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat", Hogarth created the finest rogue in all his gallery of scoundrels. This picture stands between his moralities and the rest of his portraits, and is one of his masterpieces. Lord Lovat was under sentence of expiry when Hogarth painted his portrait, and one may believe that Hogarth did non experience hampered past the restrictions which usually beset the portrait-painter. In the outcome information technology contains most of the virtues of the portraits and the moralities. Non overburdened with literary matter it has equally much malice and satire as the "Marriage a la Mode", and is every bit penetrating a piece of graphic symbol-reading equally the portraits of his own servants. Certainly it was a subject to inspire a painter of Hogarth's gifts. The nifty Johnsonian mass of Lovat's trunk supports a head which is genial villainy incarnate. No trace of repentance or regret is to be seen in the eyes of the wily old lawyer who is facing death staunch in his villainies, and glorying in them to the terminal.

Hogarth did not find such a bailiwick as this over again, but all his portraits, even the most formal and official, have an acute sense of character, and are directly and manly presentations devoid of arrayal or pretence. The grouping of portrait heads of his ain servants is the most sympathetic of all. As in the portrait of Simon Fraser, Hogarth obviously felt quite gratis from all restraint in painting these, and they take an intimacy and tenderness rather rare in his piece of work, but whioh peeps out occasionally even in the satires. Here the various characters are most subtly differentiated, and it is possible to read from the picture very clearly the relationship between Hogarth and his various servants. There is no more human and revealing picture in existence.

Hogarth'due south other portraits are not on quite so high a level, simply these two set a standard which no portrait-painter could be expected constantly to achieve. The portrait of his sister (National Gallery) with its fine colour, sharp label and vivacity of expression, perhaps ranks side by side to them, but his level was a consistently loftier one, and information technology is not easy to differentiate. "The Shrimp Girl" (National Gallery) can hardly be called a portrait, and this brilliant sketch stands quite lone in Hogarth'south work, both in sentiment and technique. It is entirely without satire, and cannot fifty-fifty exist called a character report, it is but a radiant expression of sheer joy in life, a joy which informs every swift and gracious stroke of the brush and fixes a fleeting beauty on the wing. Hogarth's art never reached a higher point than this. Technically it is quite dissimilar his other work, the impact is every bit low-cal and the paint as thin and fluid every bit Gainsborough's - a kind of impressionism which the bailiwick itself evoked. It is a farther proof of Hogarth'southward pure artistry, in which the technique seems to be inseparable from the subject which inspires it.

Hogarth had no immediate followers, and though his directly influence on English art was slight, indirectly information technology was incalculable.

Hogarth's Influence on English language Painting

Directly, caricaturists such as Rowlandson, Gillray, and Cruikshank owe something to him, and the didactic tendency of much subsequent English painting may mayhap be traced to him, just his real importance lay in bringing English painting into impact with life and ridding information technology of stale conventions. The connoisseurs of his own day considered him rather a vulgar painter, as did Reynolds, but the vitality of his piece of work none could deny. He swept away the dried atmosphere of disuse like a smashing air current, and left behind a fresh air in which a new art could grow up. He made art popular past dealing with a life which the people knew in a spirit which they could understand, and by his engravings he brought his art to classes who knew little of pictures. So, though the subsequent developments of painting in the eighteenth century practice non follow straight from Hogarth, he made them possible, and he is rightly considered the founder of the modern English schoolhouse of painting.

Of Hogarth's immediate contemporaries none show a vitality in whatever mode comparable to his. A decent technical competence and some occasional amuse of colour is all that can exist granted them. Joseph Highmore (1692-1780) and Thomas Hudson (1701-79), the chief of Reynolds, are typical. Both could paint very well so far as the actual treatment of brushes and pigment goes, but they brought niggling life to their work. Highmore certainly had some amuse and a moderate sense of character which is well illustrated past his portrait of "A Gentleman in murrey-brown velvet" (National Gallery). Simply a comparison of his illustrations to Pamela with Hogarth'south works, which hang near them in Trafalgar Square, shows how poor and thin was his inspiration in spite of a certain gracefulness. Allan Ramsay (1713-84), the Scottish portrait-painter, may be ranked with Highmore, to whose work his portraits have some analogousness.

Thus it was left to the younger generation of English painters, like Reynolds and Gainsborough, to bear the torch which Hogarth had lit.

Works by Hogarth can be seen in the best art museums in United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland.

• For more biographies of not bad painters, see: Famous Painters.
• For more about 18th century figurative painting in England, see: Homepage.

---

Visual Artists, Greatest
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF VISUAL ARTISTS
© visual-arts-cork.com. All rights reserved.

Source: http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/famous-artists/william-hogarth.htm

Posted by: kingcrind1976.blogspot.com

Share this post