Hogarth's progress

The name conjures up a landscape of disorder: a teeming, untidy world of chairs on the point of toppling over, clothes in disarray, faces which have been squashed, bruised, distorted by alcohol, emotion, or just plain living. Hogarth's England. Its grotty reality is so familiar to our 20th-century bones that we recognise it with a conspiratorial shudder - yet it is, after all, the work of an 18th-century artist, the product of a Palladian world of neat edges and immaculate wigs and brocade finery.

It is perhaps because they exist in this uneasy space between the polished veneer of 18th-century surfaces and the violence which seethes below that Hogarth's engravings retain so much appeal for 20th-century interpreters. Certainly it was no accident that when Igor Stravinsky wrote an opera based on the eight prints which make up the series, The Rake's Progress, the opera itself would come to hover in an uneasy space between the 18th and 20th centuries: praised by its admirers as an eclectic updating of classical forms, condemned by its critics as a pointless pastiche.

In the case of Hogarth it is probably true to say that every picture tells a story; but in 1730 he began work on a series of pictures which set out to tell the tragic tale of a young country girl who, arriving in London with high hopes and a letter of recommendation, is led into prostitution, imprisonment and, eventually, death. With characteristic ebullience, Hogarth described The Harlot's Progress as "a modern moral subject, a field unbroke in any country or any age".

The Harlot's Progress was extraordinary not just for its ambivalent attitude to its subject matter - sympathy for the woman's dilemma allied to a readiness to exploit the "smuttiness" of the subject, a highly saleable commodity in the 18th century just as it is today - but for the shrewdly commercial way in which the series was presented to an avid public. Hogarth began with a series of six fully-worked oil paintings, available for purchase at the usual hefty price. There followed a "limited" edition of 1,000 or so engravings, made from the pictures and sold by subscription at a guinea a time. Once the subscription was sold out, copies appeared all over London, authorised by the artist and priced at a mere four or five shillings.

As Jenny Uglow says in her biography of the artist (published last year and essential reading for anyone interested not just in Hogarth but in the literature, music and general milieu of the 18th century), he was "the first artist to advertise, to shout his wares in the press, to bypass the middleman by selling his own work . . . in the world of prints he was a hinge between the old popular art and the modern, easing open the door to mass production and pointing forward to the cartoonist and the comic strip".

Like the paparazzi of our own times, Hogarth was au fait with the latest gossip and prepared to reproduce it in visual form - at a price. When a woman named Mary Tofts achieved a short-lived celebrity in the autumn of 1726 by allegedly giving birth to rabbits, Hogarth was on the spot with The Cunicularii, or the Wise Men of Godliman in Consultation. When 22-year-old Sarah Malcolm was arrested for a triple murder in 1733, Hogarth visited her in prison shortly before she was hanged and had a print on the market within three days. By October of that year he had announced his next project, a sequel to the best-selling Harlot's Progress so obviously aimed at exactly the same audience that it would make the most unimaginative producer of Hollywood blockbusters blush: The Rake's Progress.

The series opens with a fresh-faced young heir, Tom Rakewell, taking possession of his fortune. With his wide eyes and rosebud mouth, he is a doll-like figure - but this is no innocent celebration of new-found wealth. The young man is flanked by a tailor so grim-faced he might be measuring his client for a shroud instead of a fashionable suit, and a lawyer who has, quite literally, his hand in the till. In front of him, trouble looms as an angry woman enters the house dragging a weeping, and heavily pregnant, country girl holding a wedding ring. This is Sarah Young, who - a glutton for punishment, or the epitome of loyalty? - will turn up again and again as the series progresses.

By the second plate, Tom has graduated to the world of high society. This print is crammed with knowing references to the polite society of the day; the musician seated at the harpsichord is playing the score of a new opera, The Rape of the Sabines by one F.H. (Frederic Handel). Thrown carelessly over his shoulder is an outrageously long cast list; beneath it on the floor lies a poem dedicated to "T. Rakewell Esq" but adorned with a bust of the castrato Farinelli, the darling of the music-going world of the time, whose singing prompted screaming and fainting fits among female members of the audience.

The third print moves to the society of the drinking house, with the rake being fondled by one prostitute while another steals his watch. Two women spit gin at each other while in the foreground, an erotic dancer is stripping in preparation for her performance. This is polite society &[grave;IT]a rebours: the portraits of Roman emperors have all been defaced, except for Nero; the miror is smashed; the music is no longer that of Handel but a lewd ballad called Black Jake sung by a pregnant street woman. In the fourth print, Tom is arrested for failure to pay his debts.

The unfortunate Sarah offers what money she has scraped together, but things have gone too far for that, and in print number five a whey-faced Tom marries a rich old woman in a seedy church full of cracked marble and cobwebs. Happy ever after? Unhappily, no: fortune number two is speedily despatched and in the next print, set in a gambling den, a wigless Tom (another curiously contemporary note - the bald head gives him the look of a 1990s hard man) shakes his fist at heaven. In the seventh print, Tom is in the notorious Fleet Prison, staring helplessly into space while a gaggle of women try to revive the comatose Sarah and a pot-boy tries to sell him a frothing pot of beer.

But it is the final print which is the most chilling of all: naked, insane and at the point of death, Tom sprawls on the ground amid an assortment of exotic lunatics in Bedlam. The faithful Sarah is at his side; a surgeon looks sadly down at him, unable to help; the turnkey is sufficiently moved to loosen the shackles from his pitifully thin legs. The composition of the final print of The Rake's Progress is - though Tom Rakewell is more Every man than Christ - strongly reminiscent of a Deposition from the Cross. Moral fable it may be, but The Rake's combination of warts-and-all reality and poetic beauty - the stark black-and-white of the prints is startlingly different to the glowing colours of the original paintings - gives it the sort of unsettling emotional power more usually associated with works of theatre. Which was, presumably, what appealed to Stravinsky, casting around for a subject which would embody the essence of English settecento, and his librettist, W.H. Auden, who, in less than four months, crafted one of the most stylish of all opera libretti.

Rather than matching Hogarth's story-line, the story of the opera runs parallel - and sometimes at a tangent - to it. Sarah Young becomes Anne Truelove, and is given a kindly, if somewhat naive, father. The fiendish Nick Shadow materialises from the depths of hell (there is a marvellous exchange at the beginning of Act Two when Shadow and Tom are engaged in a life-and-damnation struggle in a graveyard; the terror-stricken Tom observes "a line of cloven hooves" on the ground, only for Shadow to reply, with a shrug, "The knavish goats are back/to crop the spring's return") and in an inspired addition of which Hogarth would surely have approved, Auden throws in a bearded lady, Baba the Turk. What Hogarth would have made of Stravinsky's music, with its skewed, unmistakably modern echoes of Mozart, is another story.

Opera Theatre Company, with the RTE Concert Orchestra, begins a nation-wide tour of The Rake's Progress tonight at Dundalk Town Hall. The tour moves to Cork (Sunday), Wexford (Feb 9th), Derry (Feb 11th), Galway (Feb 13th), Dublin (RDS, Feb 17th and 18th) and Enniskillen (Feb 20th). Information from: (01) 679 4962.