William Hogarth 1697-1764 Retrospective at the Louvre

Monday, 20 November 2006 19:55

PARIS, France - Upon the initiative of Tate Britain, this exhibition was coorganized in Paris by the Louvre and the Réunion des Musées Nationaux, in London by Tate Britain, and in Madrid by Fundación La Caixa, with the exceptional participation of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. The exhibition is made possible in part by the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation. A dditional support has been provided by the British Council.

With this exhibition, the Louvre presents the first retrospective to be shown in France of the innovative, lively, witty and politically engaged work of the English painter William Hogarth (1697–1764).  One of the major figures of the English Enlightenment, Hogarth wanted to create an art that could be understood by all and established a new pictorial genre, making a break with the traditions of history painting by inventing his own subjects.  These subjects were drawn from the painter’s observations of his contemporaries, and were presented in the form of sets of episodes given wide circulation through their reproduction as engravings.  With this novel approach, Hogarth became the first English artist to enjoy international renown.  Thanks to generous loans from English museums, this retrospective at the Louvre includes 45 paintings and 40 engravings by William Hogarth, the reflection of an England undergoing rapid economic expansion and social transformation.  On Exhibition until 8 January, 2007.

William Hogarth was born in London in 1697 to a family of modest means. Apprenticed to a silver-plate engraver as a young man, he soon thereafter established his own business as an engraver.  In 1725, he began attending the art academy established by the court painter Sir James Thornhill, whose daughter Jane he secretly married in 1729.  Hogarth made rapid progress as a painter, developing a socially aware art form depicting what he described as “modern moral subjects” on canvases conceived at the outset to be reproduced as engravings.  His greatest innovation, and best-known legacy, is without a doubt the production of narrative series through which he aimed to revitalize the treatment of the artistic subject and its appreciation by audiences.  These painted and engraved series, including A Rake’s Progress and Marriage à la Mode remain his most celebrated works.  But Hogarth also painted portraits of individuals as well as the informal group portraits known as “conversation pieces”.  Abandoning social satire in these works, he demonstrated the breadth of his talent and an exceptional sensitivity towards his sitters.  Wanting to make art accessible to all, he created Britain’s first public exhibition space.  With the aim of enlarging the audience for his paintings of modern life and to educate the tastes of his contemporaries, he published his paintings as engravings, which were to enjoy wide circulation throughout Europe, and was the prime sponsor of the first statute extending copyright to graphic artists, known fittingly as “Hogarth’s Act”, which became law in 1735.

Closely attentive to the transformations affecting the period in which he lived, a time of unprecedented economic growth in England, he employed earthy realism as well as biting satire in his representations of the characteristics but also the failings and misfortunes of his contemporaries, which are certain to provide an eye-opening and amusing experience for visitors to this exhibition.

This retrospective is divided into ten sections. The exhibition closes with a set of five photographs by the contemporary artist Yinka Shonibare, following the serial principle invented by Hogarth.

Exhibition curators:

Olivier Meslay, curator, Musée du Louvre and Frédéric Ogée, professor of English literature, Université Paris 7 - Denis Diderot.

This William Hogarth retrospective is made possible through loans from leading British museums, including Tate Britain, the National Gallery, and the National Portrait Gallery in London, as well as the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, rounded out by works from private collections and engravings from the collections of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BnF).  The exhibition is divided into thematic sections, respecting the chronology of the artist and illustrating his many visual interests.

William Hogarth and His Time

The exhibition opens with a self-portrait painted in 1745.  The artist is represented in a natural and informal pose in an oval frame amusingly guarded by his dog, who is seated in the foreground with the artist’s palette and brushes alongside volumes of Shakespeare, Swift and Milton.  The first half of the 18th century was a period of intense intellectual ferment in England and Hogarth was well steeped in English literature, especially that being written by his contemporaries.  This section highlights the artist’s first exploits as an engraver alongside early paintings, such as the pair of canvases representing a couple’s struggles before and after love-making: Before and After (1730–31, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge).  Individual portraits together with one of his only paintings treating a mythological subject share space with the set of engravings entitled Four Times of the Day, which reveals his talent as an urban chronicler.

The New Social Spectacle (1): Urban Modernity and Social Upheavals

In the early years of the 18th century, Great Britain experienced unprecedented economic growth, fueled by the rise in maritime trade and the first stirrings of the industrial revolution.  The series of twelve engravings, Industry and Idleness (BnF, Paris), are presented in the manner of framed paintings, each accompanied by a cartouche and often a lengthy legend.  These plates tell the stories of two apprentices whose lives take different paths: the diligent and considerate one becomes Lord Mayor of London while his indolent counterpart suffers a miserable fate.  This series perfectly illustrates the vitality of the English capital among all classes of society. Numerous small, amusing details enliven this satire of the quest for rapid gain.  As with the series Four Times of the Day, London appears as a place where three temptations besiege all its young, honest and callow citizens: debauchery, gambling and alcohol.

The New Social Spectacle (2): Conversation and Representation

Hogarth received a number of commissions for family portraits of the English gentry in their surroundings.  These canvases depict several generations gathered in the family residence or garden, and inaugurated the genre of “conversation pieces” in England.  The sitters are handsomely attired and pleasantly share each other’s companionship, by conversing, playing music, taking tea (The Strode Family, around 1738, Tate Britain) or admiring paintings.  The art of living among the British aristocracy or newly arrived bourgeoisie in the 18th century permeates these canvases.  However, these themes did not escape Hogarth’s satirical gaze as illustrated by A Midnight Modern Conversation (Andrew Edmunds Collection, London) where a group of well-to-do revelers lose all self-control.

William Hogarth and Visual Satire

Hogarth never shied away from combining his gift for observation, his talent as an urban chronicler, and his satirical bent.  Among other works, this volatile mixture famously produced two engravings shown in this section, Beer Street and Gin Lane, using humor to depict the health-giving properties of English ale, in comparison to the mayhem and violence wrought by drinking gin, with its much higher alcohol content.  In the series of plates entitled The Four Stages of Cruelty (BnF), Hogarth is once again sincerely didactic, using the weapons of satire as an outcry against the cruel treatment of animals observed at the lowest levels of society in a city which has become a hell on earth, and the easy progression from this form of brutality to murder.  The liveliness of the scenes represented and the exaggerated expressions of the figures brings a modicum of levity to an extremely serious subject matter.

The Pleasure of the Hunt: The Aesthetics of Progress

Hogarth sought to create and develop a new visual culture, inviting the viewer to enter into the action.  To meet this aim, he chose to tell stories divided into several episodes.  In this manner, the reconstitution of scenes taking place between each episode is left to the imagination of the viewer.  Hogarth’s invention thus mirrored another great innovation being developed by his great literary contemporaries: the novel divided into chapters, which at this time was meeting with tremendous success in England and on the continent.  Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740), often considered the first true work of this kind in English, had an enormous cultural impact and was a landmark in European literary history.  Hogarth painted two major series, with the intention of reproducing these canvases as engravings, which would then be sold by subscription.  Both of these series are shown in this section of the exhibition: the edifying six-part narrative A Harlot’s Progress, showing how a naive girl from the country is lured into prostitution in London, her career soon ending in imprisonment, disease and death; and the celebrated A Rake’s Progress, consisting of eight episodes portraying the life of a wealthy heir who rejects the virtuous existence lived by his father, moving to London where, while trying to make his way in high society, he increasingly yields to base passions, frittering away his father’s money in gambling and debauchery before ending his days in a mental asylum (BnF).  Here again, the richness of each scene, the abundance of detail and the extraordinarily social precision and vibrant realism of the figures incites the viewer more to laughter than to tears and eases the absorption of the moral lessons communicated through this story.

Hogarth and the Art of the Portrait

Through his work as a portrait painter, Hogarth founded an alternative tradition to that originating with Van Dyck in the 17th century.  The vitality conveyed by his mastery of brushwork and colors, the benevolence and kindness expressed in the faces of the sitters, demonstrate how close Hogarth felt to human beings and how much he empathized with his models.  The frankness and simplicity of expression revealed in these portraits did not preclude considerable refinement in the treatment of clothing and accessories.  Young women, clergy in ceremonial attire, men of importance, young men at prayer, children playing in gardens, inhabit this universe. Hogarth’s abiding interest in the theater and literature was a fundamental part of his life and art.  He painted the portrait of the celebrated actor and playwright David Garrick, renowned as a champion and interpreter of Shakespeare and greatly admired by Voltaire, seated at his writing table with his wife standing behind him in the manner of a muse (Royal Collection, Windsor Castle).

The “Line of Beauty”

Hogarth sought to assert himself as an expert in the contentious realm of aesthetics with his theoretical treatise The Analysis of Beauty, published in 1753 and “written with a view to fixing the fluctuating ideas of taste”.  Economic expansion in England had produced new social classes eager to purchase works of art as badges of their new and recent status and to demonstrate their purchasing power.  The market for art was growing but the tastes of these new buyers were unformed.  The artist represented himself on the title page before his easel readying himself to paint, with his treatise at his feet (National Portrait Gallery, London).  In this work, Hogarth presented the fullest expression of his ideas, his attachment to the notion that aesthetic beauty derives from real, observed visual experiences in life and to the power of the serpentine line.  Hogarth wanted to be recognized as a major theoretician of the baroque and the rococo.

Marriage à la Mode

Hogarth’s celebrated comic masterpiece, Marriage à la Mode, a series of six paintings depicting “a variety of occurrences in high life”, was generously loaned to the Louvre for this exhibition by the National Gallery in London.  Suggested by current events but also indebted to a comedy of the same name by Dryden as well as another recent play by Garrick, the sequence of events in each of the canvases is to be read from right to left, as they were painted to be engraved, with the final prints revealing a mirror image of the composition incised on the copper plate.  The set was advertised for subscription in April 1743 (BnF).  This series tells the story of a loveless marriage arranged between the son of a bankrupt nobleman and the daughter of a rich City of London alderman.  Ridicule, frivolity, misunderstanding, ruin and finally death punctuate each of the six episodes in the series.  But here once more, the excess and fruitful suggestiveness of the figures, their gestures and their garb, the detailed attention to interiors and pets revealing the tastes of the protagonists, go beyond mere social satire and constitute one of the highest achievements of Enlightenment culture.

Four Prints of an Election

The last, and most ambitious, of Hogarth’s satirical narrative series, the four-part An Election (BnF), was initially inspired by the General Election of 1754 and specifically the contest for seats in Oxfordshire.  At this time, England was the only nation in which men with property could vote.  Based on his observations, Hogarth naturally expanded this initial focus into a broader satire, offering his darkly comic view of the pervasive corruptibility of the electorate, who are shown taking bribes and succumbing to other sordid follies.  The extreme expressiveness of the figures cannot fail to produce guffaws among today’s viewers, who revel in the comic brilliance and the biting social commentary conveyed by each of the many details.

Hogarth aka “Britophil”: Modern Artist, English Artist

Hogarth may be described as the first great native-born English artist for several reasons.  In fact, he was the first English painter to achieve international fame who was also strongly anti-academic in his approach to artistic practice.  Most earlier artists having worked in England were German or Flemish.  Hogarth’s ardent patriotism prompted him to establish an art academy as early as 1735 to improve the quality and status of British artists, while his reflections on art and aesthetics are conveyed through a number of his engravings, such as Time Smoking a Picture.  During this period, Hogarth’s works were distributed throughout Europe in the form of engravings and were hugely successful.   He boasted of seeking the best engravers in Paris to transfer his painted works to copper plate.  But one day, he was discovered in Calais taking a sketch of the city’s drawbridge and was carried before the governor as a spy.  Upon his return to England, Hogarth immediately produced a ferociously hilarious painting based on this experience, expressing his anti-French sentiments: O the Roast Beef of Old England (The Gate of Calais, Tate Britain, London).  Finally, the Portrait of Captain Thomas Coram (Foundling Hospital Museum, London) shows the founder of this hospital for orphans in London, which exists to this day. Hogarth not only contributed paintings of his own to this institution, but also persuaded other leading British painters to donate works to be hung in the hospital, thereby creating the first public collection of works by contemporary British artists.  The celebrated portrait of the artist’s six servants (Tate Britain, London) and the famous Shrimp Girl ( National Gallery, London) demonstrate Hogarth’s sensitivity and respect for others, regardless of their social status.

Hogarth in Our Time: A Contemporary Perspective

As is the case for this retrospective at the Tate Britain, the Louvre has decided to include a contemporary perspective within the exhibition, offered by one of the many British artists inspired by this illustrious predecessor.  The exhibition therefore closes with photographs by the British artist Yinka Shonibare, born in 1962.  His five-part Diary of a Victorian Dandy uses the serial approach adopted by Hogarth to illustrate five moments in the day of a young English man in the 19th century.  The poses, interior decoration and apparel are all meticulously represented, while the dandy in question is none other than Yinka Shonibare himself. 

Related events and publications: Catalogue of the exhibition, co-published by Musée du Louvre.  The exhibition William Hogarth 1697–1764 will travel to Tate Britain in London (February 7–April 29, 2007), then to the Fundación La Caixa in Madrid (May 21–August 26, 2007).  Visit the Louvre at : www.louvre.fr/louvrea.htm