The scurrilous secret to Hogarth’s mastery

Hogarth: Life In Progress Jacqueline Riding

Much of what we know about Georgian England is down to William Hogarth. His most famous engravings, including A Rake’s Progress, Industry And Idleness and Marriage A-La-Mode, reveal all the glamour and squalor of life in urban Britain during the 18th Century. In the first sequence (below), Hogarth follows Tom Rakewell, the dissolute son of a rich merchant, as he arrives in London and squanders his inheritance. Along the way we see brilliant snapshots of seething street life, from Covent Garden prostitutes to chinless wonders losing a fortune at the gambling table. In later pictures Hogarth shows us Tom imprisoned for debt and, finally and saddest of all, locked up in a lunatic asylum, having lost his wits along with his fortune.

It is dark and savage stuff, but Hogarth imbued what he called his ‘modern, moral subjects’ with so great an understanding of human frailty that it is impossible to feel down for too long. For every unhappy wretch who is lying drunk in the street, he draws someone who is enjoying their day in a virtuous way: a milkmaid delivering her wares in the city centre, a group of happy guests dancing at a country wedding, a merchant family wending their way home from a night at the theatre. That, suggests Jacqueline Riding in this excellent new biography, is the key to Hogarth’s extraordinary body of work: he understands that life is never one thing or another but, to use her phrase, always ‘in progress’. Or to put it another way, we are all making it up as we go along.

And that includes Hogarth. Riding is particularly good on how the boy who was born in modest circumstances in 1697 spent much of the first half of his life wanting to be a ‘proper’ artist dealing with grand, historical subjects. But circumstances were against him. Following his schoolmaster father’s plunge into poverty, ‘Billy’ had to leave school at 15 and apprentice himself to a silversmith, learning how to engrave heraldic symbols on to precious metal. It was dreary work, and even when he was well into his 20s, Hogarth was still making a living at the bottom end of the art market, engraving business cards, tickets and run-of-the-mill book illustrations.

Though a hard worker, young Hogarth relished the after-hours life of his native city, becoming a frequenter of coffee houses, theatres and pleasure gardens. Whipping out the sketchbook he always carried with him, he jotted down the characters he met in booming Hanoverian London: boozers, philosophers, prostitutes, duchesses, servants, thieves and prattling clerics.

In effect he was building up a vast databank of physical and moral ‘types’ with whom he would come to populate his extraordinary art.

Although Hogarth did make detours into other kinds of painting, especially portraiture, it was his scurrilous, generous, detailed account of modern street life that made him both rich and famous. Once he accepted that this was where his unique talent lay, he started to soar. Both the upper and middle classes loved his witty, honest and often poignant take on what life was like in this most modern metropolis. There is a rumour that the day after he died in 1764, he was due to be made

‘Sir William’, an honour that would have tickled him. For a lad who had been born in Smithfield, the raucous, stinking meat market on the cusp of the City and the West End, it was ‘progress’ of a kind that he could only have dreamed of.