In Britain, satirical art is used to comment on social behaviour

In an era when political and moral satire became a popular subject for writers, William Hogarth took the mood of the times and created a new kind of satirical art, combining topical subjects with biting humour and moral indignation.

The withering satire on contemporary life found in John Gay's The Beggar's Opera, first performed in London in 1728, was both phenomenally successful and highly influential. During the same period, the popular satirical verse of Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope was widely distributed. The artist William Hogarth was to do for art what these authors had done for literature. Hogarth originally aspired to produce grandiose history paintings, but he found that there was little interest in this type of subject in Britain at the time. The public was clearly more interested in the present than in the past. Hogarth was particularly impressed by Gay's work, which inspired him to create a new type of art form—a sequence of pictures that told a story in a way he described as "similar to representations on the stage."

In parodies on one of the most famous books in the English language, John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress (1678), Hogarth ventured into satire with a series entitled A Harlot's Progress and A Rake's Progress. While Bunyan described a progress to faith and spirituality, Hogarth's sequences tell of the journey into moral decline. The rake is Tom Rakewell, who inherited a fortune from his miserly father, squandered it thoughtlessly, was imprisoned for debt, and ended up in a madhouse. In this, the second of eight scenes, Tom has just received his inheritance, and is immediately surrounded by a bevy of people ready to relieve him of his money. A dancing master, a fencing master, and a landscape gardener, among others, surround him, coaxing him into wasting his inheritance on indulgent, fashionable pursuits.

18 A Rake’s progress II: The Rake’s Levée

William Hogarth, 1733

Hogarth devised a novel way of financing this type of project. Customers were invited to buy a subscription ticket in advance, at a cost of 10 guineas (a guinea was a pound and a shilling) for the full series of eight engravings. The artist first produced the scenes as paintings, which then became the basis for the prints. Hogarth displayed the paintings in his studio to boost the sale of tickets, but otherwise made no great effort to sell the original paintings. He kept the Rake's Progress paintings for a decade before selling them at auction, where they fetched only a fraction of the amount he had earned from the prints. Hogarth sought to maximize his income by campaigning vigorously for a copyright act, which would protect prints from being pirated. This legislation, for a time known as "Hogarth's Act," was finally passed in 1735, just as A Rake's Progress was being published.

Hogarth was able to incorporate an enormous amount of humorous detail in his work, while still ensuring that the overall scene looked fairly realistic, and was executed with care and skill. Prints were important, as they enabled artists to earn a decent living without having to rely on state commissions or wealthy patrons. With this came the independence they needed to select their own subjects, and comment on society as they chose.

TASKS