William Hogarth
English, 1697–1764
BiographyAs both painter and printmaker, William Hogarth was perhaps the most influential and original British artist. Born in London on 10 November 1697, he was the son of a classical scholar who earned a living as a schoolmaster. Hogarth began his career as a goldsmith's apprentice and engraver of silver. He began engraving prints in 1720 but, frustrated by a lack of recognition for his skills as a designer of book illustrations and satirical prints, in the late 1720s he turned his hand to painting. His earliest paintings are group and single-figure portraits, and lively scenes from John Gay's popular Beggar's Opera. From the mid 1730s through the 1750s Hogarth produced a prolific number of paintings and prints--portraits, representations of contemporary events, and "modern moral Subjects": contemporary moral progresses presented in a series of comic images (The Harlot's Progress, Marriage à la Mode, etc.). The success of these printed series inspired numerous pirated copies, inciting Hogarth to campaign for the passage of the Copyright Act of 1735. Hogarth was an outspoken advocate for a national English school of art, freed from the traditions of the Continental schools. This concern certainly impacted his role as a founding governor of the Foundling Hospital in London, which provided a much needed space for the public display of English art. In 1753 Hogarth published The Analysis of Beauty, which was devoted to the principles of aesthetic theory, and was the first such treatise to define beauty in purely empirical terms. The artist died in London on 26 October 1764.