Hogarth: A Life and a World, by Jenny Uglow, Faber & Faber, 794pp, £25 in UK
William Hogarth depicted urban life in the 18th century with an attentive eye that missed nothing of its mixture of pretension and squalor, of opulence and poverty. He painted portraits of his patrons - magistrates and merchants, gentry and clerics - with something akin to respect and only a hint of the satire that was so pronounced in his engraved scenes. In these he could give full play to his didactic instincts and the prints, which he called "modern moral subjects", were extremely saleable.
Most of the prints began life as paintings but there was more money to be made from prints and Hogarth, who did not belong to the wealthy and leisured ranks of society, needed money. The move from paint to ink made clear that the artist's vision was acerbic and had been somewhat masked by the sensuousness of his colour.
The paintings have not been held in the same high esteem as those of such contemporaries as Reynolds, Ramsay or Gainsborough. The art of his century was preoccupied with the sublime - Raphaelesque pictures of biblical subjects and grandiose portraits of the titled rich - and Hogarth had what was considered a plebeian streak. He eagerly sought for lucrative commissions - he could be as sublime as the best of them - but his true successes were not in the fashionable Italianate style; he belonged rather to the popular tradition of broadsheets and cartoons.
His prints told stories about the rising middle classes in London and about the poor that thronged its streets with all the allure of a play or a novel. Charles Lamb, two generations later, said that Hogarth's prints were "books ... Other pictures we look at - his prints we read." His pictures became stories both by appearing in series, as in the eight plates of A Rake's Progress, and by an unusual accumulation of significant detail. The public of his time would have been quick to pick up topical allusions and to comprehend emblematic devices, but there is much that the viewer, or reader, of today will miss unless they are familiar with the social conditions of the period, with the political see-saw of Whig and Tory and the ambiguous nature of Hogarth's attitude towards the status quo.
Jenny Uglow's new book, as its subtitle indicates, provides the necessary background for a proper appreciation and with the help of 207 illustrations (14 of them in colour) relates the life and the world to the work. An abundance of quotation and corroborative detail (there are over a thousand names in the index) makes the book rival Hogarth's prints in density.
Hogarth was a self-made man. His father had come to London from a farm in Westmoreland in order to earn his living as a teacher and writer of text-books but had little luck and was for a time confined to the debtor's prison. Of his nine children only three survived into adulthood, William and two of his sisters. Nothing is known of William's early education but at the age of 16 he was apprenticed to a silver plate engraver. Before completing his term he set up on his own, and at the age of 23 he was one of the first members of an artists' academy. He gradually established a sound reputation as an engraver and began to produce his own prints.
He was ambitious. He wanted the smart life, social acceptance, money and status. Without influence or connections or an ingratiating personality he could never reach the heights he aimed at. Nevertheless, he forged ahead. He had a nose for spotting trends. He married the daughter of his teacher, the sergeant-painter to the king. He made pictures of scenes from that current success, The Beggar's Opera. He began to be in demand for the informal family portraits known as conversation pieces. And in 1732, when he was 35, he produced the six plates of A Harlot's Progress. Intended as a warning against flouting the morality of the rising middle class to which Hogarth belonged, the series attacks vice but cannot entirely escape the charge of voyeurism. The public found the combination of morality and depravity irresistible. After this Hogarth may have had his ups and downs but he never looked back and never lost his natural pugnacity.
He appears to have been genial at home and this side of his character can be glimpsed in his group portrait of his servants. Like his portrait of The Shrimp Girl, it has the beauty of simplicity and is completely free of any message. These two pictures, and the portraits of his family, have no public function but seem to have been painted in unguarded moments when the painter was not thinking about his career or his stature as an artist. Beside them the satirical prints seem overemphatic and stagy for all the authenticity of their depiction of life in the 18th century. In these portraits he escaped from the minutiae of his life and world and created his most lasting images, almost by accident, for most of his work is a whole-hearted engagement with the customs and attitudes of his contemporaries and is nothing if not public in intent.
Douglas Sealy is a critic