William Hogarth

William Hogarth (1697–1764) was an English painter, printmaker, and satirist whose narrative images exposed social hypocrisy, vice, and fashionable life.

A Rake’s Progress: A series of eight paintings and engravings depicting Tom Rakewell’s descent from inherited wealth into poverty and confinement. Hogarth’s clearest extended warning against reckless spending and social ambition.
Progress pieces: Narrative sequences of images that follow a character’s moral or social trajectory. Hogarth popularized this format by publishing stories as coordinated paintings and prints.
London: The capital of England and the United Kingdom, and a major center of eighteenth-century commerce and culture. Hogarth’s crowded streets and social ranks supplied recurring settings for his satire.
Joshua Reynolds: An English portrait painter and the first president of the Royal Academy of Arts. Reynolds’s academic ideals differed from Hogarth’s insistence on the value of comic and everyday subjects.
Subscription publishing: A publishing model in which buyers pledge payment for a work before its production or delivery. Hogarth used subscriptions to finance and market ambitious print series such as A Rake’s Progress.
Marriage à-la-mode: A series of six paintings and engravings satirizing an aristocratic arranged marriage and its ruinous consequences. It exposes elite marriage as a transaction that breeds adultery, debt, and death.
The Analysis of Beauty: A 1753 treatise by Hogarth proposing principles of beauty, including the expressive serpentine line. The book explains his belief that flowing contours give forms visual life and movement.
St Martin’s Lane Academy: An informal London art academy associated with artists including William Hogarth and later William Blake. Its artistic community helped shape the professional world in which Hogarth worked.
Royal Academy of Arts: A British institution founded in 1768 to promote the visual arts through exhibitions and education. It was established after Hogarth’s death, within the academic art culture he had questioned.
Hogarth’s Servants: An unfinished group portrait of six members of Hogarth’s household, painted around 1750. Its unidealized attention to ordinary people shows a quieter side of his practice beyond satire.

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