William Hogarth: The First Modern Artist (Part 1)

How did William Hogarth transcend his humble origins to become one of the wealthiest artists in 18th century Britain? And in doing so, did he invent a new kind of art? Join Alastair and James as they chart the life and times of that most English of artists - William Hogarth. If you want to see the artworks discussed in this episode you can switch on video in your podcast app at any time. Artworks in this episode: William Hogarth, The Painter and his Pug, 1745, Tate, London William Hogarth, Hogarth's Shop Card, 1720 Marcellus Laroon, Sir James Thornhill, c.1712-15, National Maritime Museum, London Sir James Thornhill, The Painted Hall, 1707-26, Old Royal Naval College, Greenwich, London William Hogarth, Self Portrait, c.1735, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven William Hogarth, Falstaff Examining his Recruits, 1730 William Hogarth, The Cholmondeley Family, 1732, Private Collection William Hogarth, A Harlot's Progress, Plates 1-6, 1732 William Hogarth, A Midnight Modern Conversation, c. 1732, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven Recommended Reading: Jenny Uglow, William Hogarth: A Life and a World, 1998 Mark Hallett, Hogarth, 2007 Jacqueline Riding, Hogarth: Life in Progress, 2022 ————————— Follow Stories of Art on Instagram: @storiesofart.heni For more great art content visit www.heni.com or visit the Heni Talks YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/@HENITalks Hosts: Alastair Sooke and Dr James Fox Additional Research: Catherine Ingram Social Producer: Grace Dewar Producer and Editor: Ben Harding Executive Producer: Emma Cahusac

• 0:01Speaker 00

  Welcome to Stories of Art. I'm James Fox.

• 0:04Speaker 01

  And I am Alastair Sook.

• 0:10Speaker 00

  A bruiser of a man with a piggy nose, beefy jowls and a deep scar running across his sweaty forehead is eyeing us up. His name is William Hogarth, Billy to his friends, and he's clearly out to prove something. There's a palette, a pile of carefully chosen books, and to the right, Billy's beloved dog, a pug called, wait for it, Trump. Hogarth painted this self-portrait in 1745, when he was in his mid to late 40s and at the peak of his powers. Alastair, what does this picture tell us about the personality of this British bulldog of an artist?

• 0:53Speaker 01

  I think it tells us a huge amount. And I need to start by saying, when I look at this self-portrait, James, I don't necessarily see William Hogarth, I see Grant Mitchell. And I think it's worth explaining, perhaps to non-British listeners and viewers, that he was a famously macho fictional character in a very big soap opera in Britain, EastEnders. Hogarth himself was an Eastender. And, you know, down at the bottom of this picture, there's a palette where it says the line of beauty. To me, the caption should be, you want some? That's kind of what you feel when you're looking. He has that scar, he has a real sense, thanks to the pug, because he joked a lot, didn't he?

• 1:35Speaker 01

  That he had a succession of pets, succession of pugs, this one, we think, probably was Trump. And he said that he looked a bit like his pugs. And people genuinely think that maybe there's a sort of pun going on here, that that pug is there to represent the fact that he is pugnacious, because famously, he was a very combative person. He could really piss people off. I mean, his biographer Jenny Uglow talks about the fact that he could make people curious, and he really knew how to annoy people as well. But he has this reputation, as you say, for being super-British, possibly not quite the Nigel Farage of British artists,

• 2:16Speaker 01

  we hope, but maybe leaning towards xenophobia at points. There is an irony here, which I'm sure we'll get into in the course of this two-part series about him, where actually, in many ways, he's quite close to continental artistic developments, and he takes a lot from European art and artists. But traditionally, he is seen, isn't he, as the father of the English School of Painting? He really improves the status of English art, and in fact, to the extent that he has given his name to an era. It's known as the Age of Hogarth, thanks to all of those wonderful scenes, often teeming with detail, of low-life urban characters.

• 2:56Speaker 01

  You know, he's a Londoner, his art is often about 18th century London, which itself is a fascinating historical phenomenon. And consequently, he's a great fun artist to think about. I mean, I was thinking on the way here, sort of adjectives you might associate with his art, the things like, you know, rambunctious, boisterous. That is the classic way that people think about Hogarth, isn't it?

• 3:18Speaker 00

  He is one of the biggest personalities in the history of art. And as listeners to this podcast will know, there are a lot of big personalities in the history of art. But you're completely right, he is full of energy, full of aspiration, he's combative, as you say, he's arrogant, he's chippy, but he's also very loyal to his friends, he's got a fierce social conscience, he's very philanthropic, and he's just very, very funny. And I think there are listeners probably here who are thinking, God, they're doing a whole series on an 18th century English engraver. What could be more boring? Well, I think they couldn't be more wrong. He is a phenomenal artist, and I'm going to put my cards on the table here, Alastair, and say that I think there's a very strong case to be made, and I'll be making it actually throughout this series, that he is the first modern artist. I really think that.

• 4:02Speaker 01

  Well, it is interesting that he is at a hinge moment in art history, particularly in this country, where, and it's worth just keeping this in mind as a sort of big picture shift, there is a move away from a real courtly aristocratic culture towards, there's this new thriving, I mean, London at this point has become, it's a metropolis, it's, I think, by the middle of the century, it's the biggest city in Europe. And you have this emergent bourgeois class, really. And consequently, there's a lot of opportunity for canny people, entrepreneurial types like Hogarth. And fascinatingly, this picture that you've just described at the beginning, the history of it, you can actually see that in microcosm.

• 4:47Speaker 01

  Because he begins this self-portrait looking very differently, he still looks like Grant Mitchell, but in the original image, there's a white cravat, there's a sort of 18th century wig, I think he's wearing some jacket which is quite smart and formal, possibly with gold buttons. And in the 1740s, he changes it to this, where he's looking far more casual. And in a way, that suggests to me, that shift from formality to an engagement with a more informal, but also self-confident self-presentation as an artist, I think is very indicative.

• 5:18Speaker 00

  Oh, I can't wait to get into this. Okay, well, let's do it. This, then, is the first in our two-part series on the life and work of the irrepressible William Hogarth.

• 5:36Speaker 00

  Alastair, before we get into Hogarth's life, you know what we need to do.

• 5:42Speaker 01

  What do we need to do?

• 5:43Speaker 00

  Some context.

• 5:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, a bit of context, of course. I don't want people to think you monopolise the context. I like context. But yeah, go on.

• 5:49Speaker 00

  Okay, so Hogarth lives in 18th century England. He's born in 1697, he dies in 1764. So he's living through a period in which the country itself is undergoing a very significant transformation. So when he's born, England is a relatively minor European power. By the time he dies, it's the greatest commercial and imperial power in the world. And so much of that transformation is happening in the capital city, in London, where Hogarth lives. And 18th century London is just wild, isn't it?

• 6:19Speaker 01

  It's so exciting. I mean, it seems to be, the way that I think about it, is that you have these different zones. So you have the City of London, which is a great mercantile financial centre, but you also have this great expansion westwards, and you have the West End, where you have these West End squares, where aristocratic, upper-middle-class types are starting to live. Supposedly, I think they were called the Quality, that's where they're spending their winters. And then you have this curious zone in the middle, where you've got the wealth in the West End, you have wealth in the city, but also these great pockets of deprivation and squalor. But in the middle of the city, which is where Hogarth spends much of his life, in Covent Garden, you know, around where we are now, where we're recording this, in Soho, in central London,

• 7:02Speaker 01

  you have that class of artisans, artists, tradesmen, these new professional types of creative freelancers, essentially, who are what? They're gathering in taverns, they're gathering in coffee shops, and everywhere as well. Sorry, I don't think you're expecting me to go off on one.

• 7:20Speaker 00

  Oh, I love this. It's great.

• 7:21Speaker 01

  I think everywhere at this point, which I find so fascinating, you have this visual culture. Because you have an expanding and self-confident printmaking culture, which we will come to shortly. But auctions of prints in coffee shops, actual shops selling new prints, everywhere you would go around within the streets. I think I read one book, possibly it was the Hogarth scholar Mark Hallett, saying, you know, prints are basically spilling out onto the streets within London. So in a sense, that's part of the teeming context in which Hogarth as a young boy is emerging.

• 7:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's full of theatres, full of coffee houses, full of print shops, full of prisons, full of brothels. It's this kind of economic Wild West as well, where people are making fortunes and losing fortunes at the drop of a hat. It's a place, as you say, where the middle class is beginning to emerge and challenge the old order. And Hogarth chronicles all of this.

• 8:11Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 8:12Speaker 00

  I think in some ways, you could call, he's the quintessential London artist.

• 8:15Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 8:16Speaker 00

  In the way that maybe Edouard Manet is a quintessential Paris artist.

• 8:20Speaker 01

  Fascinating you mention Manet. You know, there's that concept in the 19th century of the fleneur that becomes very, very important, doesn't it? This idea of you wander through the city, and then you find it sort of later with the surrealists doing the same thing, what will you find? Hogarth, in a sense, he is England's great fleneur, where he is witnessing and observing society, top to bottom. And it's often, in his art, a real sense of the city as sometimes a threatening place, but it's abundant. It's just proliferating with people and things. They're often seemingly toppling over, everything's precarious. You know, he depicts people urinating. Does he depict people defecating? Certainly vomiting, people getting wasted, which he obviously liked doing sometimes himself as well.

• 9:04Speaker 00

  Regularly himself.

• 9:05Speaker 01

  So there's this tremendous sense of vitality and energy within him as a man, but it seems to be this perfect fit where the setting has that same variety and energy.

• 9:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, so to seek out Hogarth, we have to go to a particular part of London, the young Hogarth, anyway, which is the goriest part of London, Smithfield, because Smithfield is the home of the meat market, and was until only a few years ago. Did you ever go to Smithfield Meat Market?

• 9:30Speaker 01

  Well, I'd often cycle through. I noticed that they had... I don't know whether they still do it, a pub that had special licensing hours.

• 9:36Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 9:36Speaker 01

  So you could still be drinking, what, like six or seven in the morning? I forget exactly what the time was and you sometimes would, if I was going early for work somewhere, you might encounter people who were doing that at the end of a shift. So it's a kind of classic, again, it just feels so quintessentially London, doesn't it?

• 9:51Speaker 00

  And so Hogarthian.

• 9:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:53Speaker 00

  There's a word for you. I remember, I lived very close to Smithfield for some years and people kept saying to me, you've got to go to the meat market. So one day, ten years ago, I set my alarm for three in the morning. I walked down the deserted streets and as soon as I arrived at Smithfield, the whole place erupted into life. The first thing I saw was a man carrying a dead pig on his shoulders down the street. There were hundreds of people in white overalls, covered in blood. The pubs were open, the cafes were open. It was this world in a world. And this is the world in which Hogarth grows up. He grows up within sniffing distance of the meat market. He's born on the 10th of November, 1697. His father is called Richard, his mother is Anne. They're a quite unfortunate couple. They have three children who die in infancy.

• 10:36Speaker 00

  Their fourth child survives until he's 10. So Hogarth is really the first child they have, not the last, but the first who makes it into adulthood. And Richard, Hogarth's father, he's a quite pitiful individual, isn't he?

• 10:50Speaker 01

  He's a really fascinating figure and partly because, I think he was a schoolmaster. I think he had pretensions to be a scholar. He felt that he was very poorly treated by potential aristocratic patrons and also tradesmen. And you have in his son, William Hogarth, this great, as we've said at the start of this, this great entrepreneur. Richard is like the sort of anti-entrepreneur. So it's quite curious, I wonder quite whether, was it Hogarth reacting against what happened to his dad? But famously, he had this concept, didn't he? Which was, he wanted to start, and I think he tried to, a coffee, a coffee shop. And the coffee shop had one special thing, which was that everyone in it would speak Latin.

• 11:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:35Speaker 01

  And unsurprisingly, it tanked.

• 11:38Speaker 00

  It tanked so badly.

• 11:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:40Speaker 00

  So I think we have to say that Hogarth, Richard Hogarth, is quite a naive individual. He's from the country. He's actually moved to London only a few years before William is born. He's, he's actually grown up in pretty much, I think, the late district nowadays, as we call it. So he comes, he's a schoolteacher, he's got a school round the corner, but he's always got these harebrained plans. And as you say, the Latin coffee house doesn't last. But it's very unfortunate because poor Richard, he goes bankrupt.

• 12:05Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 12:06Speaker 00

  And he ends up in prison. He ends up in a debtor's prison called The Fleet. Terrible place, fetid, filthy, corrupt place where prisoners even had to pay for their own chains.

• 12:15Speaker 01

  And he's there with the family, right?

• 12:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, the family. So this is formative experience for Hogarth. He's what, nine, 10, 11 years old at the time? The family actually move into property that is run by the prison. So they're out of the actual prison itself, but they're in prison accommodation. Really disastrous experience for the family. Actually, can you think, little quiz, Alastair? Can you think of another great British cultural figure whose father was imprisoned for debt?

• 12:42Speaker 01

  Dickens?

• 12:43Speaker 00

  Dickens. Because Dickens' father was at-

• 12:45Speaker 01

  God, I got that right.

• 12:46Speaker 00

  Yeah. Dickens' father was at the Marshalsea.

• 12:49Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 12:49Speaker 00

  And the Marshalsea appears in a number of Dickens novels.

• 12:51Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, the really interesting thing is that with Hogarth, he depicts prisons and incarceration a lot. And I know in the second half of this, we're going to talk about a really famous work of art in which a prison plays a very prominent role. I mean, do you feel like in a sense, you know, I've just described the fact that maybe William is reacting against his dad, Richard, in terms of that lack of business nous. Somehow maybe that schools him that being canny is what you need to do to get through life. But also perhaps he's motivated by, he never wants to be in that situation himself.

• 13:24Speaker 00

  I think it's so important, motivating force for Hogarth, is that he's aware that this kind of free-for-all that is London creates winners and losers, and his father is a loser.

• 13:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:33Speaker 00

  And he does not want to be a loser.

• 13:34Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 13:35Speaker 00

  But yeah, so they're ending up in this prison. The father is still continuing these harebrained schemes. I mean, he's got this big plan for an enormous Latin dictionary, but the publishers pull the plug. Hogarth never forgives them for this. The mother, poor Anne, is desperately trying to feed and clothe her children. She's making these gripe ointments at home and selling them on the street.

• 13:52Speaker 01

  Well, I don't know much about Anne. What are those things?

• 13:54Speaker 00

  These are products, medicinal products, that are to try to stop babies crying.

• 14:00Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 14:01Speaker 00

  So she's doing this, she's dealing with her own children dying. She's living in prison accommodation. Richard's got this big plan for the Latin dictionary. She's out, you know, house by house, trying to sell these products she's making at home. It's a terrible, terrible experience. And I actually think that in many ways, Richard's financial mismanagement is excellent news for the history of art. Because I think had his projects worked, William would have stayed at school, probably been a scholar and an author like his dad. We'd never have heard of him.

• 14:31Speaker 01

  Become a hack on Grub Street.

• 14:33Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 14:33Speaker 01

  Much like us, James.

• 14:34Speaker 00

  Yes, he would never, he would never have appeared on this podcast.

• 14:37Speaker 01

  No.

• 14:37Speaker 00

  But because the family have so little money, he has to become a dreaded tradesperson.

• 14:43Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 14:43Speaker 00

  So in 1714, when Hogarth is 16, 17 years old, he takes up an apprenticeship as a silver engraver with a man called Ellis Gamble, who lives in what is today Leicester Square. Back then was, I think, called Leicester Fields.

• 14:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:00Speaker 00

  It's very menial work.

• 15:02Speaker 01

  What does he do? Is it like inscribing designs onto silver? It could be like a silver vessel that needs a coat of arms or a crest, that kind of thing?

• 15:10Speaker 00

  He's doing, he's doing monograms, initials, coat of arms, onto silver trinkets. He really doesn't like doing it.

• 15:16Speaker 01

  I suppose the interesting thing is that he is learning to use an engraver's tool.

• 15:21Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 15:21Speaker 01

  There's one specific tool known as the burin, which he must at that point be becoming quite familiar with.

• 15:27Speaker 00

  Yeah. He's learning his skills, he doesn't want to do it, but he needs to make some money. And you know, a few years into his apprenticeship, Richard, his father, who's never really recovered from his imprisonment, he dies. And so then at that point, William really effectively becomes the sole breadwinner of the family. But what we do know is that during this apprenticeship, Hogarth is showing an interest in and quite a talent for drawing. So there are a couple of interesting stories that reveal this. There's one story in which on a Sunday, Hogarth goes for a walk up the hill to a village called Highgate. It's now part of London, of course. And he goes to a pub, which is probably The Flask, a very good pub.

• 16:04Speaker 01

  It's a great pub.

• 16:05Speaker 00

  Still exists.

• 16:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:06Speaker 00

  And in the pub, he witnesses a fight. Someone clanks a tankard over another person's head. There's blood going everywhere and Hogarth makes a drawing of these two and everyone is very impressed. There are also other stories that when he's going to coffee houses and theatres, if he doesn't have any paper, he will make likenesses of people on his thumbnail.

• 16:25Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 16:25Speaker 00

  And the internet says that this is the origin of the term thumbnail sketch.

• 16:28Speaker 01

  Interesting.

• 16:29Speaker 00

  Don't think it's true.

• 16:30Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 16:30Speaker 00

  But anyway, it's a nice story. So he's obviously got these artistic inclinations.

• 16:34Speaker 01

  He's precocious.

• 16:36Speaker 00

  Precocious.

• 16:36Speaker 01

  But also there's that sense, I think you used the adjective irrepressible at the start, that he actually needs to do this. He is observing and he has to somehow express what he's seen.

• 16:45Speaker 00

  Yeah. And so in 1720, he leaves his apprenticeship, perhaps a little bit early. He's now what, 22, 23 years old, to become a freelance engraver, to go independent. And fascinatingly, we have the shop card.

• 17:01Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 17:02Speaker 00

  That he creates that year. Do you think that's revealing in any way, this shop card?

• 17:06Speaker 01

  I, I, I do think it is revealing. It's revealing because, well, first of all, he's becoming this independent copper plate engraver. And I think much later, there are these fragmentary unpublished autobiographical notes that he writes. And he said that at 20, you know, engraving on copper was my utmost ambition. So he feels he's moving in the right direction. These shop cards are essentially, you know, like a business card, really. It's something that you could advertise what you do. There's one in particular, which we know he was up and running by the spring of 1720. When you see this shop card, what you find is in the middle, in very, very flouncy, flowery, there's a great calligraphic flourish of his name, W. Hogarth Engraver. So that's signalling that he's, what was it called?

• 17:51Speaker 01

  Like a pensman, penman, that you could do lettering as well as other designs? And then there's a very ornate frame that goes all the way around this. There are allegorical figures, there's one of Art, who rather, in a slightly self-aggrandising gesture, is pointing, well, gesturing her hand towards Hogarth's name. And then there's this other bearded, slightly hunched figure representing history on the other side. Above, you've got these two, there's a cherub representing design, is it, with an architectural drawing? But beneath, there's something called a cartouche, a kind of oval, which contains a date, which is why we know he was up and running by spring of 1720. And the date that it gives is the 23rd of April, 1720. Highly significant date.

• 18:33Speaker 00

  Not an accident.

• 18:34Speaker 01

  Not an accident. St. George's Day and Shakespeare's Birthday. And I think what's very interesting is that it's a bit of self-fashioning, self-presentation. The famous self-portrait of him with the pug that we started with, what we didn't mention is that it's a very complex and interesting painting. It's almost like Still Life. You see this oval where you can see, which is the self-portrait itself, but it's a painting of a painting. You can see the edge of the canvas with nails kind of tacked in. And the oval with Hogarth's self-portrait is on top of three volumes. It's on top of Milton, Jonathan Swift, great satirist, and Shakespeare, who during the 18th century is, there's that sort of phenomenon of bardolatry. He becomes the great English national genius, if you like.

• 19:18Speaker 01

  And it's tempting to see something similar going on here, where there's an illusion actually, you know, this doesn't look, if you didn't have the name Hogarth there as a shop card. You wouldn't think this is something that was produced by the person who'd gone to do these great satirical pictures of low-life London. Instead, it feels like it's about refinement, it's about learnedness, and he does seem to be trying to associate himself with Shakespeare and native genius. Or do you think that's too much?

• 19:46Speaker 00

  I think it's absolutely true. I think he is identifying himself as English. I mean, as you said at the very beginning of this episode, he doesn't really like foreigners very much, he hates the French, and obviously there is a context to this, and the context is that for hundreds of years in England, all the best art jobs have been taken by foreign artists, northern Europeans, Italians, and so English artists have really not got the opportunities that he feels they deserve. And one of Hogarth's life's missions is to try to promote the English, the native course of painting, and to show that English people can paint just as well as Europeans can. So I'm sure this is part of his shtick here, is identifying himself not as a foreign engraver, but as an English engraver.

• 20:25Speaker 01

  Which is interesting, because bear in mind as well that, you know, there are a lot of things going on here. His painting, which we'll come on to in a moment, starts to emerge during the 1720s, but, you know, a copperplate engraver is actually doing essentially more hackwork, really. It's maybe book illustrations, it's possibly theatre, benefit tickets, what are some of the other things?

• 20:47Speaker 00

  More shop cards, funeral notices, wedding invitations.

• 20:50Speaker 01

  I mean, one of the things that I found very interesting, reading about the London art world in the 18th century, is that, of course, you don't have a system where you have streets with loads of numbers. So everywhere needs a sign. So a lot of work that was going to artisans, I mean, this wouldn't necessarily be a copperplate engraver, but is producing signs for businesses, for premises, so, and also working sometimes for the theatre, as you said. So on that sense, it's fairly prosaic, but you also have within printmaking this emergence of this whole new-ish genre, or rather, it becomes very invigorating in the 18th century, of so-called graphic satire. And I think this is clearly a field in which Hogarth is going to excel before we get on to all the painting. But slowly, just bear in mind, in the 1720s, he's starting to find an output to, rather

• 21:34Speaker 01

  than just replicating the images of others, perhaps, he's making independent images himself, which will satireise great scandals, political scandals, social scandals of the day. So that's happening in the 1720s.

• 21:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, so he embarks as this independent engraver, he's making a little bit of money, not a lot of money. There's a lovely passage that he writes about this experience commercially, and I'm going to read it, I warn you, I'm going to read it in my Hogarth accent.

• 22:01Speaker 01

  Oh, excellent.

• 22:02Speaker 00

  Which is probably not how Hogarth spoke, but it's how I-

• 22:05Speaker 01

  It's how Grant Mitchell speaks.

• 22:06Speaker 00

  It's Grant Mitchell, it's how he sounds in my head. He said, "I remember the time when I've gone moping into the city with scarce a shilling in my pocket, but as soon as I received ten guineas there for a plate, I've returned home, put on my sword and salied out again with all the confidence of a man who had ten thousand pounds in his pocket."

• 22:25Speaker 01

  I found it quite hard to follow the content there. It's like, you've made him a kind of ragamuffin from The Beggar's Opera, which of course he famously depicts.

• 22:33Speaker 00

  That's how I see him.

• 22:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, no, I get it, it's good, it's good.

• 22:35Speaker 00

  I think there's something of the black cab driver about Hogarth, you know, a real inveterate Londoner.

• 22:40Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 22:41Speaker 00

  Who knew the city back to front, knew all the secret ways around the city. Anyway, but the thing that that doesn't reveal is he is deeply aspirational. We talked earlier how his father was a bit of a loser.

• 22:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:53Speaker 00

  And it became a life's mission for Hogarth to not be a loser, a bit like Michelangelo, actually. We did that series about Michelangelo, who also had a loser of a father, and that drove him on creatively. So when he embarks on this career as an engraver, he also wants to be an artist.

• 23:08Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 23:09Speaker 00

  And this is when he starts, around the same time, going to art school. So there's an art school in London run by a French artist at the time, whose name escapes me.

• 23:17Speaker 01

  Louis Cheron.

• 23:18Speaker 00

  Ah, perfect.

• 23:19Speaker 01

  History painter.

• 23:20Speaker 00

  Louis Cheron. And so Hogarth, he's doing his engraving work during the day, but in the evening, he goes and he takes his life drawing classes. Doesn't last very long, because Cheron himself goes bankrupt, has to flee, goes back to France to avoid paying his debts. So in 1724, big turning point for Hogarth.

• 23:36Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 23:37Speaker 00

  He goes to another art school that is in Covent Garden and is run by a man called Sir James Thornhill.

• 23:43Speaker 01

  Now, he is a fascinating, and I think slightly neglected, overlooked figure in British art history.

• 23:50Speaker 00

  Not a household name any longer.

• 23:51Speaker 01

  He is not a household name, but he was really successful in his lifetime. And one of the reasons he's interesting is, you were saying earlier, that until Hogarth, basically continental artist, came over here, stole all the artist's jobs, and really thrived, and there wasn't a really great native tradition, you didn't quite do it in that black cab way. But Thornhill is a rare, and perhaps first example, of someone who, in that very competitive environment, is winning prestigious, big decorative commissions, and he is the first quote-unquote "native English artist", he's from Dorset, old Dorset family, he's the first English artist to be knighted for his work. He decorates St Paul's, he decorates, if you've been to Blenheim Palace, then the Great

• 24:36Speaker 01

  Hall, there's a ceiling by Thornhill, he decorates Hampton Court, he decorates Chatsworth, and he decorates Greenwich, quite famously, because he works there on and off for, I think, like 19 years, doing a number of murals, a couple of big painted ceilings.

• 24:50Speaker 00

  Hogarth is in awe of Thornhill.

• 24:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:53Speaker 00

  I mean, I think he sees in Thornhill everything that he wants to be. Thornhill is rich, Thornhill is famous, Thornhill has a knighthood, Thornhill is, as you say, making these great works for public buildings across London.

• 25:06Speaker 01

  He becomes sergeant painter to the king in 1720s. That's an official lucrative position, you know, yeah, he's at the apex of the art world in this country.

• 25:14Speaker 00

  And Thornhill, sort of very kindly, actually, takes Hogarth under his wing, he does some life drawing with him, he teaches him how to paint and all. But the other great legacy of the Thornhill interaction is while William, Billy, is going round to Thornhill's house in Covent Garden, he gets to know his only daughter, Jane Thornhill, Jenny, as he calls her.

• 25:35Speaker 01

  What do we know about Jane?

• 25:36Speaker 00

  Not much, she's younger, she's 10 or 10 years or so younger than Hogarth, but he falls in love with her.

• 25:41Speaker 01

  Ah.

• 25:42Speaker 00

  And at some point in about 1729, this is sort of speculation, but I pretty, I imagine this happened, Hogarth would have knocked on Thornhill's studio door and asked permission to marry his daughter. And what does Thornhill say?

• 25:54Speaker 01

  He says no.

• 25:56Speaker 00

  He's not up for it. He says no. I think he likes Hogarth, but he thinks he's a nobody, he thinks his daughter can do better. Thought Hogarth, remember, you know, his father was in prison, he's got no money, he's got very few prospects at this stage. So what does Hogarth do?

• 26:09Speaker 01

  Well, he runs off, doesn't he, with Jane?

• 26:12Speaker 00

  He runs off with Jenny.

• 26:13Speaker 01

  Doesn't he, he takes her to, basically, they get married in a slightly strange place, in what was then the village of Paddington, without permission.

• 26:18Speaker 00

  Without permission. So he gets, 1729, he gets married, he's about 31 at this point, Jenny is about 20, they get married without Thornhill's permission. Thornhill must have been really miffed, they do make up later.

• 26:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:32Speaker 00

  But I think just before we go to the break, Alison, we need to talk a little bit about art.

• 26:36Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 26:37Speaker 00

  Because by the time he marries Jenny, so by circa 1729, early 1730s, Hogarth is actually making paintings.

• 26:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's painting by now. So he starts, and actually, he's really pioneers the tradition of painting theatrical scenes, you know, we talked about Shakespeare, he paints, there's a famous scene involving full staff that he paints, he does paint scenes from The Beggar's Opera. And then you have, because you have these sort of things going on in parallel in his world and his life, so you've got through the 1720s, his graphic satires, his printmaking, which is emerging and will become extremely important the following decade, we'll get to that. But simultaneously, you have that painting strand, and it's almost as though he's trying to signal that, yeah, okay, he's associated now, in the popular imagination, with really raucous subject matter and art, but he could also do refined.

• 27:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 27:23Speaker 01

  And you have this new-ish genre that emerges in European art at this moment, which Hogarth pioneers in Britain, which is known as, rather prosaically, it doesn't sound that exciting, but it's interesting, called the conversation piece. And what this is, is rather than in days of yore, you'd have, you know, sort of grand courtly portrait of maybe a monarch or someone at court, and it'd be quite stiff, they'd be looking at you, it'd be, feel quite formal, you'd have much smaller scale canvases, where you have groups of often well-to-do people enjoying bourgeois pursuits like drinking tea, or playing cards, or indulging in the wonderful pursuits of conversation. And you'd have an opportunity to, for fashionable people to show off their taste, their sense of fashionability, if you like.

• 28:07Speaker 01

  And Hogarth starts painting these conversation pieces, and actually, that happens really into the 1730s. And there's one in particular that you actually suggested that we talk about it, and I was delighted to talk about it, because I've seen it in reality, it's in Houghton Hall in Norfolk, I'll tell you about that in a moment. But this particular conversation piece depicts an aristocratic family in this case, it's called the Chumley family.

• 28:34Speaker 00

  Now, we should say, so we've got lots of American listeners, we should say that there are several names in England that are not pronounced as they are spelled, and this is spelled Cholmondeley.

• 28:45Speaker 01

  Cholmondeley.

• 28:46Speaker 00

  But we pronounce it Chumley.

• 28:47Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 28:48Speaker 00

  Anyway, go ahead.

• 28:49Speaker 01

  So this dates from 1732, and I suspect I know why you were keen to discuss it, because-

• 28:57Speaker 01

  What it is, is an interior and it's a grand house. And the picture, many commentators have noticed, is really divided into two zones. You have on the left, a library setting and on the right, more of a picture gallery. And down the middle, you have this sort of seemingly projecting wall of a bookcase, as well as the edge of a rug, which one writer has said is ominously ruffled. It seems to be curled up and that seems to be like this dividing line between the two halves. And on the left, you have a very proper polite, adult, grown up world, where you have George Chumley, sitting, looking across at his wife, Mary, who we know actually is, in this case, a posthumous portrait.

• 29:41Speaker 01

  She had died, I think it was the year before the painting was made. She died of consumption. Her body was lost at sea when it was being brought back to England from, I think, France. And she's being honoured here with, you can see these putti above with a sort of swag of drapery, which signalling her status. And she is holding their youngest child, who I think is called Frederick. And meanwhile, behind the Viscount George, you have his brother, who's a colonel in the army with a red coat, and he's called James. So that all feels perfectly well to do and, to be honest, not tremendously exciting to look at visually. But James is looking over at the other half of the picture. And this is why I think you've picked this as the father of two. Can we call them, can I call them boisterous boys? Lovely boys who I've met and they're wonderful children.

• 30:24Speaker 01

  But you have two boys on the right and they're causing havoc. It's total anarchy within this stately home. And one of them, the younger one, I forget his name. One of them, I think the older one's called George and then the other one's called Robert. So Robert, maybe he's about five years old. He's let up on a big ornate chair. And this is, I said before about Hogarth and toppling things. There's a stack of books that you can imagine, maybe his dad grieving his wife has thought, I need to go and have some time alone. I'm going to read, I'm going to select these titles carefully. My quiet library. In comes Robert, leaps on this chair and he's kicking the pile of books over. And one of them, I think you can see, is sort of open and seems to be flying. It's almost like some sort of magical effect in a Harry Potter movie.

• 31:08Speaker 01

  It's shooting out from this pile of books. And the older brother, George, maybe he's about eight, he's running towards. And the great brilliant Hogarthian ambiguity is, is he seeing that the pile of books is about to fall over and that his younger brother's about to fall over as well and he's going to stop it? Or is it animal spirits of boyhood, he's rushing to join in? And there is this sense here of the two, I always see it as the two realms of Hogarth's world, where it's decorum, but also that sense of, as I say, animal spirits, a sense of really winning, charming and infectious to look at, kind of anarchy that seemed to be here being merged. And this is still owned by the family. So the wife, Mary, you see in the picture, was the daughter of Britain's, you know, what is often called Britain's first Prime Minister, Robert Walpole.

• 31:53Speaker 01

  And he's the man who built the Houghton Hall in Norfolk. And it just so happens by chance, I went to interview their descendant, who's called David. He, this was for a piece for The Telegraph a while ago. And at the end of the interview, he took me into, I think it was in the yellow drawing room, where you could see a number of works, including this one. And his wife, Rose, Lady Chumley, she has twin boys, they have twin boys together. And she was saying how much she loves this picture because it really reminds her of her children, who genuinely would supposedly, particularly when they're younger, run amok within this stately home, whizzing around on scooters and all the rest. So I quite like that fact. But there's a great truth to this, isn't there?

• 32:30Speaker 00

  It so is. I mean, I've got two sons exactly the same age as the boys in this painting.

• 32:34Speaker 01

  Right.

• 32:34Speaker 00

  One of the reasons, I mean, I'm not a huge fan of Hogarth's early paintings. I feel they do seem quite dated. There's too much wig action for me.

• 32:41Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 32:42Speaker 00

  But I do like this one. I have a soft spot for this one because I think if Hogarth had come to my home to paint a family portrait, and our home is not as grand as this, it would have played out in exactly the same way. My wife and I, Keith and I, would have been sitting quietly, neatly in one side of the room. My sons would have been creating chaos in the other side of the room. And it proves that I think-

• 33:04Speaker 01

  We had you all over for lunch, I can attest. It was a little like that.

• 33:07Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 33:07Speaker 01

  It was very charming, it was wonderful. But it was a bit like this picture.

• 33:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. But I mean, I think that's the thing about Hogarth, there's always something. Even in pictures that don't necessarily seem that radical on the face of it, there's always something subversive, there's always something mischievous, there's always something funny going on. I think Hogarth was completely incapable of producing a boring picture.

• 33:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:28Speaker 00

  But let's bring this Alastair to a break. By about 1730 or so, Hogarth is in his early 30s. He's married, he's married well, and he's beginning to emerge as a promising young painter, though I think, let's be honest, hardly setting the world on fire. But his career is about to ignite. So join us after the break.

• 33:54Speaker 01

  If you want to see the artworks we're discussing, you can switch to video in your podcast app at any time.

• 34:01Speaker 00

  And a reminder, you can find us on Instagram at storiesofart.henny. So please do follow us, comment and by all means, suggest topics for future episodes.

• 34:18Speaker 00

  Welcome back to Stories of Art. It's now 1730 or so and Hogarth Alastair has a revolutionary idea for a new kind of art. As he puts it with characteristic immodesty, "A field unbroken up in any country or any age." Alastair, what is his idea?

• 34:38Speaker 01

  So this is something which he terms modern moral subjects. And the fundamental premise of it is that he is creating sequences, series of pictures, which themselves are very narrative driven, great, great storytelling, sometimes featuring recognisable characters that his audience would have known from real life 18th century English culture and society. And often taking lowlife characters as their subject. Now, in a moment, we're going to talk about the first that he creates, which, I mean, it's great fun to discuss, I'm sure it will be.

• 35:21Speaker 01

  They have a slightly sort of often, because they're very satirical, almost to me, I'm never sure how I quite feel when I'm looking at these pictures. They can be quite grim, almost bitter. There's a sort of cynicism about the corruption of the world he's exposing again and again and again. We've sometimes been asked, doing this podcast, you know, is there a period you're doing where you'd love to go and live in that period? I mean, I think you said, actually whilst we were doing this, you'd love the idea of meeting the Mears, 17th century Dutch Republic would be great. I would love to visit 18th century London, but I would never want to linger there for long, partly because of the way Hogarth depicts it. But there is this kind of novel concept, which just to describe art historically, it's very dynamic.

• 36:06Speaker 01

  So the fact it's sequential means you can start to get interplay between images. So motifs can talk to each other, as it were, which is quite exciting. But there's also this real new premise on, you know, progress. But it's not spiritual progress and that old pilgrims progress, Bunyan idea. Instead, it's often a character who has a sort of rise and then real fall, a tragic fall. And there's this new focus on the individual. And that I find very interesting because there's a wider context. There's something in the zeitgeist in the 18th century where you could contextualise this and look at the rise of the European novel.

• 36:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 36:45Speaker 01

  And if you look at the titles of lots of the famous novels at that point, they're things like Tom Jones, Tristram Shandy, Mole Flanders. These are individuals' stories. And I think Hogarth, in pictorial form, is doing something very similar.

• 37:01Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 37:01Speaker 01

  And we should be slightly resistant to just accept this because in a way, this is how Hogarth is generally viewed. But there was a later critic called Charles Lamb, who really solidified this, this take on Hogarth. He said that Hogarth's graphic representations are indeed books. They have the teeming fruitful suggestive meaning of words. Other pictures we look at, his prints we read.

• 37:27Speaker 00

  One thing I think is true is that they are genuinely revolutionary. I mean, it's a genuinely new thing in the history of art that Hogarth is about to produce. And I think for a few reasons. First of all, these series that he starts to produce, first of all, it's one of the really the first times when we have an artist who's not only creating images, he's creating characters, he's creating his own original stories, his own kind of visual novels. That is really new. It's not totally unprecedented, but it's really new. Second, the subject matter. I mean, British art before this and European art before this, mostly it's about history. Ancient history and religion, it's about kings and queens and princes. This is about the life of the city around him. It's addicts and sex workers and criminals and, you know, the ordinary people.

• 38:12Speaker 00

  So that in itself is also quite new. The final thing that's really new, and we'll come to this in a moment, is the business model.

• 38:19Speaker 01

  Yes, interesting.

• 38:20Speaker 00

  He has total control over this output. He is the producer, he's making the paintings, he's creating the prints, he's managing the subscriptions, he's doing the advertising, he's selling the works, he's delivering the works. And remember, in the 18th century, at this point, 1730s, at this point, there's not really much of an art world. So he is like an art world in his own right. He's the artist, he's the producer, he's the gallerist, he's the dealer, he's the PR person. All of this is so new in the 1730s.

• 38:51Speaker 01

  I mean, what's fascinating, and we're skipping ahead slightly, but he does get ripped off instantly. There are pirated versions of his prints, almost from the off. I mean, earlier than in the 1730s, I think. And of course, that's a massive bugbear for him.

• 39:06Speaker 00

  We'll come to that.

• 39:06Speaker 01

  And we will come to that later on, yeah.

• 39:08Speaker 00

  But let's home in on his breakthrough work, his first great modern moral subject. It's a series called A Harlot's Progress. He makes it between 1731 and 1732, when he's in his mid 30s. He makes six paintings on-

• 39:24Speaker 01

  Well, what he does is he makes a painting which ends up being the third plate of the accompanying prints. Because those six paintings that you described, which he does end up making, they're destroyed in a fire in the 18th century. So the way we know about this series is through the prints that he makes. But initially, he creates a picture and it's a picture of one of these, you know, a lowlight of a sex worker. And it ends up being the third plate in the series. And it's quite popular. And somehow, he has the idea, or it's suggested to him, that maybe he can turn that picture, with its suggestive alluring sex worker in it, who would eventually be called Mole Hackabout, into a wider series.

• 40:05Speaker 01

  Talking about visualising her experiences in London, looking back and indeed forward to her demise.

• 40:12Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 40:13Speaker 01

  So he does start with that initial work.

• 40:15Speaker 00

  Yes, and then he expands into six images, six paintings that then get converted into six prints that tell the story of this young girl called Molhakabout who comes to London. I'm not going to do a spoiler here, but who comes to London with a hope of making a new life and things don't go very well. And what we're going to do, Alistair, over the next 10, 15 minutes or so, is we're going to talk through this really compelling story and compelling set of images. Do you want to begin with the first image?

• 40:45Speaker 01

  I will start then with plate one of A Harlot's Progress. And I think the thing to just think about is it feels, we've already talked a little bit about Hogarth's love of Shakespeare, the fact that he's created depictions of theatrical works. There was a real sense here of a stage set, don't you think?

• 41:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 41:06Speaker 01

  This is a drama. He talks about how his paintings are quote unquote dumb shows. And what you see here is almost like the flats of, you know, theatrical flats scenery in the background of these backdrops of London. And in the foreground, you have the two principal characters of this scene. So you have Mol herself, who's just arrived in London, and she's very young and she's very pretty. And she's probably looking for work as, I don't know, a domestic servant or a seamstress, because you can see hanging is just off her arm, there's a, there's a pin cushion and some scissors. And there is a little note next to a goose, which is in the bottom right corner, which is, has this long neck, which is draping out the basket, which refers to the fact that she's meant to be meeting a cousin.

• 41:50Speaker 01

  Her cousin in London has not come, she's just off the York stagecoach. So she's fresh from out of London and she's arriving for the first time in the big smoke.

• 41:59Speaker 00

  Do you think by the, we're sorry to interrupt, but do you think there's something autobiographical going on here? Because we talked right at the start of this episode about how Hogarth's own father, Richard, he'd come from the north.

• 42:10Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 42:11Speaker 00

  He'd come from the countryside to make a new life for himself and everything had gone very badly wrong. I wonder whether Hogarth's channeling a bit of the family history there as well.

• 42:19Speaker 01

  That's a very interesting psychological dimension that I haven't really thought about. I mean, obviously he's recasting his dad as this very alluring young 20-year-old, but certainly they both seem to share perhaps a certain naivety. I mean, you know, goose, that goose is an emblem for what? Gullibility, naivety, you know, it's a silly person and she is being a bit silly. And then you, the other protagonist of the scene is this older woman dressed in finery who is approaching her. And she's someone who would have been recognised by Hogarth's audience. She was someone who, I mean, in all the literature, she's referred to as a board, i.e. a pimp. She's procuring sex workers, young women to have sex with her clients.

• 42:58Speaker 00

  Her name's Mother Needham.

• 42:59Speaker 01

  Mother Needham. So often these boards were known as mother. And she's standing beneath a giant pub sign, an inn sign, which you can see a bell, which is above her, which is a classic little Hogarth device. It's sort of doing multiple things at one time. It's establishing that it's an inn, it's a play on the French word belle, meaning beautiful. So it refers to Mol and her beauty. But also there's a kind of joke that it's hovering above Mother Needham, who herself has this bell-like shape. And in the background, I guess cuss stepping out of the inn is a figure who also would have been known to Hogarth's original audience, who's a really quite sinister Harvey Weinstein, Mohamed Al Fayyad style.

• 43:41Speaker 01

  You know, this is, this is a Me Too narrative, you know, before Me Too had become a thing, as it were.

• 43:46Speaker 00

  He's an absolute rotter.

• 43:47Speaker 01

  He's a rotter and he's got one hand, which I think lots of scholars, they use the word suspicious, that basically he's playing pocket billiards. He's having a good old fiddle. His pocket, his hand is very deep in his pocket and he's ogling poor old Mol. And the implication is really that Mother Needham is, you know, we know what's going to happen and that her innocence, she's going to be seduced by this, this great sex pest who went on trial for raping, I think, his own servant.

• 44:09Speaker 00

  He was sentenced to death.

• 44:11Speaker 01

  And then the king, I think.

• 44:12Speaker 00

  He got pardoned, didn't he?

• 44:14Speaker 01

  Like classic corrupt sort of story.

• 44:15Speaker 00

  But he had died, he actually died in 1732. So he died when these prints came out. Mother Needham had died after being pilloried, I think a year or two earlier. So these are real figures that everyone who was looking at these prints, they know. It is like, as you say, if Grayson Perry were to do an image today and put Jimmy Savile or Harvey Weinstein or Mohamed Al Fayyad and everyone would look and go, oh yeah, I get it.

• 44:36Speaker 01

  It's interesting, Grayson Perry is unthinkable as an artist without the precedent of William Hogarth. But just to finish the point about the sort of shift from innocence to seduction and a fall, on the left of the image, you can see there's this oblivious clergyman, Parson, who, who almost is like Mol is flanked by the mother figure of Mother Needham, not a very good parental influence, and the supposed father figure of, you know, this clergyman on horseback. But he's completely missing the fact that this crucial moment, this sliding doors moment, if only she could be kept out of Mother Needham's clutches. And his horse is knocking over, what is that, a pile of buckets?

• 45:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 45:13Speaker 01

  Pails? And they're toppling over, again, Hogarthian toppling moment, presaging Mol's own fall.

• 45:20Speaker 00

  The church is not going to come to her assistance.

• 45:22Speaker 01

  Certainly not.

• 45:23Speaker 00

  One other tiny little detail that I really want to draw people's attention to. If you look closely at Mother Needham's face.

• 45:29Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 45:30Speaker 00

  It is covered in black spots. This is something that's a very significant tell in all of Hogarth's images. And it is a sign of the pox, it's a sign of venereal disease, probably syphilis. And when you see someone's face with spots in a Hogarth image, you know things aren't going to go well.

• 45:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, indeed.

• 45:46Speaker 00

  Well, let's move to image two. Time has passed. Mol is now a kept woman. She's the mistress of a wealthy merchant. She's clearly living in style, Alistair. She's surrounded by paintings, by porcelain. There's an ornate four poster bed in the background, which I'm sure she's making a lot of use of. She has her own black servant with a feather in his turban. And it's immediately clear, I think, I don't know what you think, that she has changed. I mean, she's no longer naive and innocent, is she? She's, she's got swagger, she's got arrogance.

• 46:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, she looks, she looks really in control. And actually, there's a sense here of hubris, because it's almost like she's too cocky.

• 46:23Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 46:24Speaker 01

  She's suddenly got a taste of the high life. And she is, as you say, she's a kept mistress of this figure in, in a wig, who she's sitting with in the, in the foreground. But behind, I mean, you mentioned that four poster bed, one of her young lovers, a different lover, is creeping out. And actually what she's doing here is she's creating a distraction, isn't she? So that her lover can escape.

• 46:44Speaker 00

  She's kicking over the tea table, sending all this expensive china flying in order to create a distraction so her lover can creep out of the four poster bed and disappear out of the room without her master, if you like, knowing.

• 46:57Speaker 01

  And you know what he's doing, because I mean, you refer to the fact that Hogarth's quite xenophobic. Hogarth was quite keen to point out that the wealthy figure of whom she is the kept mistress was Jewish. And in the background, the young, probably aristocratic lover with one stocking that's falling down his leg and an unsheathed sword is making this gesture, isn't he? With his fingers, this quite lewd gesture, which is suggesting something rather scurrilous about the size of the wealthy man's member.

• 47:28Speaker 00

  Oh, is that what he's doing?

• 47:29Speaker 01

  Possibly.

• 47:30Speaker 00

  Very interesting. One very interesting detail, look closely at Mol's face, it's the black spot.

• 47:37Speaker 01

  Ah.

• 47:38Speaker 00

  So she now, even by plate two, quite early on in this story, she has got the telltale signs of a pox. She's probably got syphilis.

• 47:47Speaker 01

  And I, I quite love as well, just the fact that, you know, it's worth pointing out that in Hogarth's best and most brilliant images, you have this real complexity whereby all of the elements, there's a real intricacy to the composition and the elements are referring to each other and commenting on each other. So in this case, you can see on the left, there's a mask of a masquerade ball, which is suggesting that she is enjoying the high life. But next to it, there's this pet monkey. I love the detail of the pet monkey. It feels like the pet monkey has the same expression of the wealthy Jewish.

• 48:22Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 48:23Speaker 01

  Lover, who's the protagonist here, of shock and surprise. And so perhaps there's a slightly uncomfortable suggestion here that that figure is aping high society when he has pretensions above his station. But also the way that that, he seems to be, he's got some sort of garment that looks a bit frilly and flouncy and looks much like some of the clothes that Mol is wearing.

• 48:43Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 48:44Speaker 01

  So it's a reminder that even though she's seen in this great moment of agency, as you say, she's creating a distraction, she's showing a nipple, she's clicking her fingers at the older man and kicking over the table. She is, although she's forgotten it, still just a pet, a plaything.

• 48:59Speaker 00

  Yes. And also the monkey is, if you like, aping her and she is aping a lady. She's pretending to be a lady. It's fantastic, complex image. Let's move to image three, Alistair.

• 49:10Speaker 01

  Yes. Things have changed here. Mol is now no longer living the high life. Instead, she's in a garret. And we know that the garret is just around the corner in Drury Lane. So where it's now theatre land, but in Covent Garden. And.

• 49:28Speaker 01

  In this picture, she is, this is the one that Hogarth did a painting of that initially began the whole series.

• 49:34Speaker 00

  This is the original then, okay.

• 49:35Speaker 01

  I believe so.

• 49:35Speaker 00

  Right.

• 49:36Speaker 01

  And she's sitting on a bed. The interior is much plainer, there are no longer old masters on the walls, although there are reproductions. And she's looking out in a rather alluring fashion, in a semi-state of undress, on this bed, whilst holding and showing off this fob watch, which you think perhaps she's nicked it from one of her clients.

• 49:58Speaker 00

  Almost certainly.

• 49:59Speaker 01

  Definitely. You have next to her this, another bell-shaped female figure, but it's not Mother Needham, it's now someone who is a bunter. So a sort of a servant, really, who doesn't seem to have a nose. She's pouring a liquid into some, into a teapot. And beneath Mole, you can see this cat, very suggestively placed pussy. And above on the wall, you have some rather strange and interesting details. You have a witch's hat.

• 50:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, what's that all about?

• 50:30Speaker 01

  I, I don't, I mean, I'll tell you what it's about, James. She was, these are services she could offer her clients. If you liked a bit of roleplay, then she's got the witch's hat, and she's also got this, what is that, sort of birches?

• 50:43Speaker 00

  Broom, witch's broom.

• 50:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, witch's broom.

• 50:45Speaker 00

  Would she, would she, oh, is that what she would?

• 50:47Speaker 01

  I think flagellation may have come into, these are some of the, there's a bit of S and M, which is possibly going on here.

• 50:52Speaker 00

  I'm clearly too innocent of these ways.

• 50:54Speaker 01

  And above, you have a wig box balancing precariously on the top of the bed, and the name on the side of it is James Dalton.

• 51:00Speaker 00

  Very interesting.

• 51:01Speaker 01

  And this is interesting because, in a way, in the 18th century, in the popular imagination, the figure of the harlot was a well-established figure of great interest to the public. So was the figure of the highwayman. And James Dalton was a notorious highwayman, who, I think before this, had been executed at Tyburn.

• 51:20Speaker 00

  In 1730, so two years before the engravings come out, he had been executed.

• 51:25Speaker 01

  So very famous. So, you know, the implication is either that possibly James Dalton has been one of her clients, maybe he liked it when she put the witch's hat on, or there's this sort of wider idea that maybe highwaymen were sometimes hung out in brothels and that's where they hid. And then in the background, on the right, you've got these figures coming in. There are bailiffs, and there's a man in a wig who's putting up a finger to his mouth and looking across and surveying the scene. He again was a known figure, an English judge, justice, called Justice Gonson, who was very big on public order. And he's coming in to, I guess, essentially arrest and reprimand Mole for what she's doing. There's just a detail where he seems to be contemplating, there's a lot of debate about whether perhaps he's going to let her off,

• 52:07Speaker 01

  because she's just so charming. You can look at some of the pictures, which are within the picture, which are hanging on the left, which may, we won't get into it, the detail, but their subtext may suggest that that's perhaps what's going on. But have you, look, I've never really read this, but it just suddenly struck me looking at the image. If you look at the curtain on the side of the bed, and it's tied up into a great knot. And the bit on the right, which he seems to be contemplating, it really looks to me like a death's head.

• 52:33Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 52:33Speaker 01

  A skull. You can see two eye sockets, a nasal cavity, and almost the beginnings of teeth. A bit like that anamorphic skull you find in The Ambassadors, which we spoke about in the Holbein episode. And I just wonder whether there's a little coded reference there, which is again, foretelling what's going to happen to Mole. And this figure of Justice Gonson is reflecting on mortality as well as vice.

• 52:55Speaker 00

  Well, it doesn't go well for her, that's for sure, because by the time we get to plate four, Mole finds herself in Bridewell Prison, sentenced to hard labour, though she's still in her flamboyant dress, and still her breasts seem to be falling out. And she, and we see other criminals as well, they are beating hemp. So they are, I think, actually making rope for the hangman's noose. So she does end up working in textiles. I mean, she comes to London with her, you know, her pincushion. This is what, it's not probably what she anticipated.

• 53:25Speaker 01

  I think there's an irony here as well, because that witch's broom, if you like, in the previous scene, she was beating her clients. And now she's beating hemp, and indeed the warder is raising a cane, isn't he, to tell her to work harder?

• 53:37Speaker 00

  Very intimidating guard he is standing next to her. We can also see a woman behind her, who I think is possibly stealing from Mole, and she's winking at us. It's one of the great Hogarth tricks. He'll often have a character in an image who is making direct eye contact with the viewer in a sort of knowing way. We can also see her own servant, did you use the word bunter, is that what it is? We see her own bunter on the right, actually now betraying her own boss. She's trying on Mole's stockings, she's trying on her shoes.

• 54:08Speaker 01

  And she's also grinning. You know, there is a sense that these characters are reveling in Mole's distress. You know, it's a really interesting idea, just to pause for a moment, you know, what is the, the tone, if you like, of images like this? Because those quote-unquote low-life figures who are grinning and winking seem to be encouraging us, the viewer, to also be complicit in Mole's downfall and to enjoy it. But at the same time, you've got to have some sympathy for her, haven't you? It's not just a simple case of, oh, she had ideas above her station, this is what happens, right?

• 54:37Speaker 00

  It's brilliant ambivalence, isn't there, in Hogarth's work, in that you have, when you can imagine the 18th century relatively middle-class people who would be viewing these images, that they would find them immensely entertaining, they would spot in jokes, they would spot references that are probably still escape us.

• 54:54Speaker 01

  Titillating as well.

• 54:55Speaker 00

  Very titillating, lots of breasts falling out, as I say, but also surely there is a sense of sympathy for those people who have been ground down and destroyed by London itself. It feels like London as society is the real villain at the heart of this, rather than Mole herself.

• 55:11Speaker 01

  I think on that note, you have here, I think it's Bridewell Prison where she is, you know, where these felons would be committed to hard labour, you have a really stark depiction of the brutal prison system, justice system, that was the case in England at this moment, so.

• 55:29Speaker 00

  And remember, Hogarth had these experiences himself.

• 55:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, right, so this is one of the prisons.

• 55:33Speaker 00

  As a, as a young man, as a, well, as a boy, really, at the age of 10, he would have spent time in the prison. His father was a prisoner. That again is surely something he is channeling, his own personal experience.

• 55:43Speaker 01

  But it, but it is physical violence. In the background, there's a whipping post, and there's also this poor, is that a man or a woman? I can't quite see, but right at the back is standing face to the wall with their hands in a raised stock, so they're trapped there. And I think the emblem, that sort of the inscription on that stock says, better to work than stand thus. And you have the wages of idleness, which is on the whipping post. So there is this sense, as I say, of corporeal punishment is just a reality, but this is a violent world. And Hogarth does not shy away from depicting that violence.

• 56:17Speaker 00

  Never, ever does. And just again, look again at Mole's face, the pox is spreading, so she's, you know, it's not going to end well. Let's move to image five now, Alistair. That pox, of course, is syphilis.

• 56:28Speaker 01

  Well, we now know that she's on the way out, because she's back in the garret, a garret, and she is trying to undergo treatments for this sexually transmitted disease, for syphilis, and you see her swaddled, almost like a shroud, but in these, what would have been called sweating blankets, to try and sweat out the disease, sitting by the fire. And she, she's looking incredibly sick, with her bunter next to her, reunited with her, who seems furious with these two gentlemen on the left of the picture, one of whom has a very flamboyant wig. And we know one of their names, he was a, they're both probably quacks, really.

• 57:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 57:05Speaker 01

  You know, they're doctors, but they're doctors who are peddling ridiculous things. His name is written to the right of the image, near where you can see teeth, because of course, they're actually Mole's teeth, her syphilis has caused her to lose her teeth. But one of these doctors is called, what is it, Dr. Rock?

• 57:20Speaker 00

  Richard Rock.

• 57:21Speaker 01

  Richard Rock. And I, I rather find him an interesting character, because he was peddling medicines, you know, he was a real quack. Ironically, he was actually offering cures for toothache, given that her teeth are placed on this piece of paper in the image. But he also had this particular, this thing, which he called the famous antivenereal grand specific pill.

• 57:42Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 57:42Speaker 01

  Which makes me think of something that, you know, perhaps Donald Trump would have prescribed in Covid. You know, total nonsense. And Hogarth is having a real dig here at these, these two doctors who are having some sort of spat between themselves, they're arguing. They're completely ignoring their patient, who's dying before their eyes. And you can see here as well, by the side of Mole, on her other side, from the bunter, is a young boy, her illegitimate son, who's reaching out for some food, and really is this horribly innocent victim in this whole cycle of corruption and collapse and, and social decay. And then final figure on the left is rummaging around in a trunk to find presumably clothes that could work as a burial shroud, because she's that close to death.

• 58:27Speaker 00

  One of the things that's so interesting about looking at this particular image is you get a really clear example of how Hogarth, and you mentioned this before, how he makes all these back references across the images. So, for instance, the table knocked over.

• 58:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:42Speaker 00

  At the middle of the picture, it reminds us of Mole in her pomp, kicking over that tea table. It's supposed to remind us, look where she's come from. And on the left, you mentioned that woman going through Mole's luggage. That's the same little trunk she brought with her when she first arrived in London, four pictures earlier. She arrived with everything she owned packed inside it. Now, before she's even dead, London is taking it back.

• 59:06Speaker 01

  That, that table is so clever, because it really pinpoints, this is the language of images. By referring back, it's pinpointing that earlier image and saying, that was the key moment. You know, that moment of hubris, you know, she really was getting above herself, big mistake, look where it's taken her to.

• 59:23Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 59:23Speaker 01

  It's a very efficient way of storytelling in a visual mode.

• 59:26Speaker 00

  He was such a master, Hogarth. Anyway, we get to the final image, image six, poor old Mole Hackabout is now dead. The coffin tells us she's only 23 years old. Yet even here, Alistair, in death, there's no dignity. Sex workers are gossiping and flirting. One woman tries on Mole's clothes in front of a mirror. The undertaker is being pickpocketed. A clergyman drunkenly fondles a young woman.

• 59:51Speaker 01

  He also is spilling his drink rather suggestively of, um.

• 59:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, while spilling his drink. And at the foot of the coffin, we see Mole's small son quietly playing with a spinning top. I mean, what's his future?

• 1:00:03Speaker 01

  Hmm, not good. I mean, you, you can't even see Mole's face here.

• 1:00:07Speaker 00

  No.

• 1:00:07Speaker 01

  And it's, it's interesting because there's a lot of performative grief. But we don't quite know whether these other sex workers and people who've gathered there are lamenting the fact that this could be their own fate, whether they really give a shit or care at all about Mole. Or, you know, because one of them is, um, as you say, staring at her own reflection in a mirror. And then this idea that Hogarth introduces where, well, first of all, Mole has gone from a sense of possibility arriving in the city. We've then seen her confined in these spaces, a garret, a prison, and now actually a box, a coffin.

• 1:00:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:00:43Speaker 01

  And her individuality is gone. You can't even see her face in this image. She's disappeared now, even though she's at the centre of that picture. And then on right and left, as you say, you have these sex workers who are using this as an opportunity to ply their trade. And the one on the left is looking out with that quite again, alluring is always the word that comes to mind, but it, you know, she suggestive expression, which really is reminiscent of Mole in that plate three where she's looking out. And there's a sense of, you know, this woman is pretty and attractive and she's obviously attracted the attention of this clergyman. She's holding up a sprig of rosemary in an erect fashion whilst he's spilling the drink, whilst having a fondle underneath her skirts. And there's a sense that that cycle is just going to carry on and on and on.

• 1:01:28Speaker 00

  Nothing has been learned.

• 1:01:29Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:01:29Speaker 00

  The cycle of exploitation continues. And the saddest thing, I suppose the most poignant thing about it is Mole's own child, a child who, um, is destined to inherit the same world that destroyed his mother. He's got no hope. And this is a really, so we'll discuss this in the next episode. It's something that actually Hogarth felt very strongly about. He felt very strongly about orphaned children, children who'd been abandoned. He fostered children himself. And the child is the real victim of this.

• 1:01:57Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:01:57Speaker 00

  A child who's done nothing wrong, but has grown up in this, in this broken society. It's so powerful.

• 1:02:03Speaker 01

  It's really, really powerful. And, and the fascinating thing is that this is a game changer.

• 1:02:07Speaker 00

  Game changer.

• 1:02:08Speaker 01

  It, it was a, just a massive hit. It was a huge sensation. I think first of all, the paintings and prints are displayed to the public in the home of his father-in-law, James Thornhill. But then it just, they'd sell out, don't they? I mean, it makes his name. He becomes incredibly rich on the back of this. He can move house.

• 1:02:25Speaker 00

  Well, let me tell you how rich he becomes because he charges a one guinea for a set of six prints. And he gets, I believe, 1,240 subscribers. So he makes 1,240 guineas from a Harlot's Progress.

• 1:02:41Speaker 01

  Is that a lot?

• 1:02:42Speaker 00

  To put it into context, Alistair, the average artisan, say a silver engraver, earns 40 guineas a year.

• 1:02:48Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:02:49Speaker 00

  So Hogarth is making more from a Harlot's Progress than a silver engraver would make in their entire career.

• 1:02:54Speaker 01

  Which he could have been. Of course, he began as a silver engraver.

• 1:02:57Speaker 00

  Exactly. He is earning with 1,240 guineas, that's two or three times what a wealthy semi-aristocratic gentleman would have made in a year. So he is absolutely rolling in it.

• 1:03:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:07Speaker 00

  It has, I mean, I don't know what his expectations are. He was a very arrogant man, obviously, probably had high expectations. It would have almost certainly exceeded those expectations wildly.

• 1:03:17Speaker 01

  I mean, Thornhill Senior must have been quite pleased.

• 1:03:21Speaker 00

  Oh, maybe, maybe this is, maybe this wedding was a good idea. But, um, one of the problems is despite this immense success, he notices, and you've mentioned this already, that people are immediately starting to pirate.

• 1:03:32Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:03:33Speaker 00

  Images. So some people are going into the house, making copies of the paintings and then going back and making their own prints. Others are subscribing and then making their own copies based on the prints. And then they're selling them across London at much lower prices and the quality isn't as good.

• 1:03:47Speaker 01

  Well, it's just worth just reflecting on the twofold problem, which you've alluded to there. So one is that it's denying him a share of the profits that he should have had. You know, it's, it's, it's a monetary problem. But the other one, which I think gets overlooked is interesting. It's that artistic quality one.

• 1:04:03Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:04:03Speaker 01

  Because what's going out into the world associated with his name is stuff that's not that good and certainly not of the status that we've just been describing.

• 1:04:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:04:11Speaker 01

  So he's very keen to try and combat this at this moment in the 1730s, isn't he?

• 1:04:17Speaker 00

  Yes, he's, he's furious and he does look into it and, and try to work out whether he can bring charges, but he discovers there's really no legal protection for him. I mean, there was, there is a copyright law that's in place since his childhood. In 1710 it came in, but that was mostly for books. There was very, very limited protection for printmakers in that copyright law did protect the plates.

• 1:04:41Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:04:42Speaker 00

  It did not protect the drawings, the designs.

• 1:04:45Speaker 01

  So in other words, if you're the seller of prints, if you're a print seller and you own that sort of like hardware, as it were, the plate itself, you have control power protection, right?

• 1:04:54Speaker 00

  Provided someone doesn't steal your actual plate, they can do whatever they want. They can make as many copies as they like. And so Hogarth, with characteristic determination, he decides to change the law.

• 1:05:04Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:05:05Speaker 00

  So what he does is he gathers a group of six other engravers, the sort of magnificent seven. They meet in a coffee house, probably not one that speaks in Latin, and they prepare a document and formally petition the House of Commons. And they write, this is how it starts, it says, "Sir, you will not wonder at the number of impertinent people who find continually breaking in upon your time. I beg leave therefore to lay before you the case of the above-mentioned artists." And they go on to explain their story, to explain how shopkeepers and publishers have been stealing their work. I'm sure there's an element of revenge here as well, actually, Alistair. Remember, Hogarth's father had tried to do this Latin dictionary, the publishers had betrayed him. William Hogarth had never forgiven them for this. So he hates publishers.

• 1:05:50Speaker 00

  My wife is a publisher, but he hated publishers. And then they go on to make a really, really powerful point. They say, "The securing of every one, the fruits of his own labour, is the greatest and noblest encouragement than any art can possibly receive because it is their most natural, equal and extensive." So what they're doing there is they're making a case for intellectual property.

• 1:06:13Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:06:14Speaker 00

  You know, and actually I think this is the great innovation of this act because it does actually become law a few months later, by the summer of 1735. Government passes an act that creates modern artist copyright as we know it. And the big shift it makes is to say that an artist's work is not just physical property, it is intellectual property.

• 1:06:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:37Speaker 00

  It's not just about who has the plate or who steals the painting, it's about reproduction of images. And the idea that an artwork is the invention of an artist.

• 1:06:46Speaker 01

  And I think it's about this shift that we've touched on a few times already in this episode of the status of the artist, of the artisan artist. And Hogarth, you know, people maybe sometimes forget this, he is instrumental in soaring up and indeed raising the status of the artist in that way. And this is one, okay, it's legalistic, it's legal history, it's not as exciting as looking at the Harlot's Progress and so on, and thinking about that storytelling and his great artistic innovations. But it's hugely important, isn't it?

• 1:07:16Speaker 00

  So important. I mean, as an artist and as a broadcaster and as I guess, and I suppose a podcaster now as well, um, I recognise that securing copyright to reproduce images can be a real ball ache. It can be really annoying. I remember when I published my first book, it was an academic book, and I spent months seeking copyright permissions. I spent thousands of pounds getting permission to reproduce these images. It's really annoying, but it's also a crucial, uh, protection for those who are creating images. And we have a lot of artists listening to this podcast, they will know how important copyright protection is, especially in the AI age. And to some extent, they have Hogarth to thank for that.

• 1:07:56Speaker 00

  But let's wrap up this episode, Alistair, with a wonderful little story.

• 1:08:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:03Speaker 00

  Because, um. Shortly after Hogarth completes A Harlot's Progress, he's doing so well, he's so rich, he's famous, even Thornhill's happy with the marriage, as we say. So he decides to celebrate. And this brings us, I think, to the the single most entertaining episode in the whole life of William Hogarth, which is the peregrination, which is a posh word to describe a bender with his mates.

• 1:08:30Speaker 01

  A pub crawl.

• 1:08:31Speaker 00

  A pub crawl.

• 1:08:32Speaker 01

  Kind of like stag do almost, or?

• 1:08:33Speaker 00

  Yeah. It's it's so incredible. It begins in May, seventeen thirty-two, a month or so after A Harlot's Progress comes out. And Hogarth and four of his best friends, one of whom is his brother-in-law, they meet at a pub.

• 1:08:44Speaker 01

  In Covent Garden.

• 1:08:45Speaker 00

  Bedford Arms Tavern in Covent Garden at midnight. They have a few beers, and they decide drunkenly, on the spur of the moment, they should go and do a trip.

• 1:08:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, why not?

• 1:08:54Speaker 00

  So they rush home, they pack their bags, and then they walk through the streets of London, singing as they go. They get onto some boats, and they take a boat out, or several boats, actually, out to the Isle of Sheppes in Kent. And they spend five days travelling around Kent.

• 1:09:11Speaker 01

  Recording what they're doing.

• 1:09:12Speaker 00

  Recording what they're doing, drinking an enormous amount, spending a lot of time in pubs, they're mostly drunk the whole way, and...

• 1:09:20Speaker 01

  I mean, there is a painting by Hogarth of a scene of men who are properly pissed, really legless. And it does feel that he's painting from experience.

• 1:09:29Speaker 00

  It does. They're doing some sightseeing, they're taking the piss out of each other, they're drinking almost continuously, they're getting into fights, they're getting bitten by bedbugs, and they're behaving disgracefully wherever they go. There are a couple of great stories that come out of this episode. One of them, Hogarth just ends up playing hopscotch with a friend in the street. There's another in which they get caught in this torrential downpour, and the five men decide to have a play fight. They start hurling sticks and stones and pig shit at each other. The most famous story is when they go to a place called Who, they go to a churchyard one morning. And Hogarth has clearly been eating and drinking too much. When he gets to the churchyard, he starts to get diarrhoea.

• 1:10:13Speaker 01

  Oh, God. I think you brought this up in an interview supposedly to advertise this podcast.

• 1:10:17Speaker 00

  I think I did.

• 1:10:18Speaker 01

  Recently. What are you doing? But yes, it's a great story.

• 1:10:21Speaker 00

  Anyway, he gets the cramps, he runs over to a grave, he pulls down his trousers, he squats over a grave, and he unloads his bowels.

• 1:10:29Speaker 01

  Nice. What an image. And we'll leave it there.

• 1:10:32Speaker 00

  Okay. Over the graveside. Meanwhile, some of his friends, who either find this so inappropriate or so amusing, they pluck some stingy nettles from a bush, and they start stinging his buttocks. Hogarth is screaming, there's some kind of fight that takes place. Hogarth then staggers over to a church with his trousers around his ankles, and then finishes the job against the church door. So I think this is a good place to finish, actually. I think we should be leaving our listeners with a mental image of William Hogarth defecating against a church door.

• 1:11:02Speaker 01

  I think I think that is, it distills, doesn't it, that sense of knockabout, scatological, earthy, down-to-earth, you know, a sense almost of like, it's associated in some people's minds with a strain of real Englishness, the fact that drinking is involved. But I think it is worth saying that, because they write this up, don't they?

• 1:11:22Speaker 00

  They do.

• 1:11:23Speaker 01

  And he and others were drawing, making sketches along the way. It's not just a case of carousing England football hooligans, you know, centuries before, causing havoc in Kent. There is almost, and I like this, a sort of slightly satirical intent to the whole thing, because they're kind of taking down the vogue for the aristocratic grand tour. They're doing their own grand tour, but it's not around Italy, it's in Kent. And they're not admiring churches, they're doing what you've just described in churchyards. And there's also a sense that there was a real vogue for antiquarians, very interested in monuments, ancient monuments, and trying to publish things. And I probably will get

• 1:12:06Speaker 01

  the detail of this wrong, but I seem to remember, when they actually published their account of it, isn't it called Peregrination, Volume One?

• 1:12:12Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:12:13Speaker 01

  And the joke is that, of course, there's never going to be another volume at all, but they just like to be mocking the pedantry of those antiquarians as well.

• 1:12:20Speaker 00

  So Hogarthian, isn't it?

• 1:12:21Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:12:22Speaker 00

  Anyway, we should wrap this episode up. But there is so much more to come. In the next and final episode, we'll be exploring Hogarth's probably greatest masterpieces, his extraordinary charitable work, his creation of a modern art world in some ways, and his involvement, Alastair, in the first conceptual art exhibition in history. It's going to be a belter. Goodbye.

• 1:12:43Speaker 01

  Goodbye.

• 1:12:49Speaker 00

  If you've enjoyed this episode, please do follow Stories of Art wherever you get your podcasts, and maybe even leave a review.