Saylor.org ARTH207: "William Hogarth"

This lecture is entitled, William Hogarth. Can a painting tell a story? Can it poke fun? Now, those are clearly kind of leading questions because, first off, we know a painting can tell a story. We've seen paintings that tell a story, but William Hogarth, and you see his self-portrait over here, took the storytelling aspect of painting to new levels that we haven't really seen before. We definitely haven't really looked at paintings that poke fun at things. Hogarth was a master of this. Just really quickly, the name of this painting over here is The Painter and His Pug. It dates to 1745. This is the man of the day, the man we're looking at. It's a really interesting self-portrait. I think right away you can tell we're going to be looking at some really interesting stuff today. Now, he is often called a literary painter. Literary painter. That's because his paintings were literary satires. Satirical literature was very popular in England at the time Hogarth was painting. He's known for what he called his modern moral subjects. Subjects. That's exactly what he painted. He painted contemporary issues that he infused with a kind of moralizing tone. His patrons would actually subscribe to his paintings and they would receive print versions of his paintings which were serialized. He would produce a series of paintings that together told a story. That's another way in which he was kind of a literary painter. Just before we take a look at one of his most famous works, it's important to keep in mind that we are in England. That's the context here. We're not in France. We're not in Italy. Actually, Hogarth was very anti-France. Very anti-Italy. He was very, very anti-Rococo. That's an important thing to keep in mind as we look at the art that he was creating. We're going to look at one of his most famous paintings from the series known as Mariage à la Mode. This series pokes fun at well-to-do English people. Some of these people he saw as shallow, immoral, superficial. Let's take a look at this really famous painting from the series. Here it is on the left. On the right we have the very familiar Fragonard, The Swing from French Rococo. Over here we have the breakfast scene. Breakfast scene. It's the second of a series of six paintings about a marriage. It dates to 1743. We're going to take a look at this painting, a bigger image of this painting, in just a second. Before we look at it closely, I wanted to compare it to the roughly contemporary Fragonard on the right. It's 1767. This is what's going on in England. This is what's going on in France. I think you can see quite a few similarities, first off. We can tell these are both contemporary scenes. You can see they're in contemporary dress. Very different settings, but they're both very rich and lush and over the top, but in different ways. Also, these are stories of couples. In Fragonard's we have this secret scene of these lovers in this lush garden. Over here we have a married couple in a domestic setting. Big difference between these two is in Fragonard's painting, In The Swing, we're given a very romantic scene that we might want to imagine ourselves being in. We might want to be this woman on the swing, enjoying this romantic, beautiful moment. Whereas in Hogarth's scene, he's very critical of these people. They're not shown in a sympathetic light. We'll see how in just a second. You come away from looking at this and you do not want to be these people. You stick your nose up at these people because they're immoral and not the most decent people. Also, just before we move on really quickly, I think you can see an important and interesting stylistic difference here too. We've got the sumptuous, soft, light brush strokes of the Rococo and a little bit more straightforward style by Hogarth. Let's take a closer look at this painting. Here it is a little bit bigger. You can see a few of the really interesting details in this painting. The whole series, and again this is the second out of six paintings, the whole series tells the story of this young couple's marriage. Over the course of the series, you see how it begins to fail. In this particular scene, which again is the breakfast scene, I'll write that down again, breakfast scene, we see this young couple in their home the morning after a night of what we can assume was pretty immoral behavior. They spent the night apart. We get some hints that the husband was out doing some immoral things with another woman perhaps. This painting is just filled with tiny little clues. First off, we can see, you don't have to look too closely at some of these little details around the room. You can see right off the bat two servants putting their hands up in frustration. The house is a mess. These people, they're not really prim and dignified and put together, the young married couple. They're lazing about in this messy room. The servants are frustrated trying to deal with the mess that they have to deal with because of these people. Then we take a look and there are some interesting little details within the painting. Over here in this man's coat pocket is actually a cap, a woman's cap. We can assume this has to do with perhaps where he was last night. The dog, I love the little detail of the dog discovering this little cap in his pocket. There's, in the servant's hand, unpaid bills, so these people are off doing these immoral things while practical matters such as bill paying are not tended to. You could go on and on. There's a lot of details throughout this room. Every detail has been observed and recorded for its meaning in the bad behavior of these people. Instead of looking at every last detail, I just wanted to point out one really interesting detail about this painting. It's set in this very classical style room. We have the columns, the arches, there's a little statuary. We have even this kind of classical style detail above the fireplace. Then there are sort of Baroque details and Rococo details that kind of identify this as an Italianate or Francophile room. We have Baroque paintings on the walls, the figurines, the classicizing bust above the fireplace, and even this very ornate Rococo clock. I mentioned at the beginning of this lecture that Hogarth really detested Italian and French and Rococo style. Whereas we might see this setting and think, oh, it's very lofty and noble and befitting these noble people, Hogarth is trying to tell us that, well, of course, people who patronize this kind of art would be these shallow, immoral people. So he's kind of giving us a different message than what we're used to seeing with basically the styles and the traditions we've been dealing with this whole class. In England, they were not necessarily as revered as they were in other places. So just an important thing to keep in mind when you take a look at this really interesting and very detailed painting. Now, Hogarth's satirical prints were really, really popular. In fact, they were so popular that people often plagiarized his work. They copied it, and he sought copyright for his work. That was a really new and unique thing to do. So that's another way in which he's kind of literary and modern and moving forward from what we've looked at in the past. Really, ultimately, he's created art that acts like literature. It tells a story in a very literary way, which really makes him a quintessential English artist working in the 18th century.