Eighteenth-century scholars cannot overlook or ignore William Hogarth’s art. His prints illustrate the stark realities and contradictions of eighteenth-century social and cultural life and scholars cite them within different disciplinary discourses. However, although we might assume we have encountered every angle on Hogarth, revelations are always possible. This exhibition included significant loans from private owners and institutions in Britain, Europe and the United States, enabling a wealth of juxtapositions to pose new questions. Unravelling the most important of these took a while to do as we encountered familiar paintings in new contexts. The catalogue Foreword of this exhibition acknowledges previous explorations of Hogarth’s art from a variety of perspectives and offers a ‘more fragmentary presentation of his work’ alongside work by contemporaries in Paris, Amsterdam and Venice (p.6).  This approach introduced work by a host of less familiar artists on complementary subjects, although these were of mixed quality and their inclusion did not necessarily indicate influence or collaboration. The exhibition was ‘fragmentary’ in different ways and tackled a variety of broadly connected themes which eventually cohered as a significant critique of the global eighteenth century, its injustices and its ‘others’, exposing European complicity far beyond what might have been assumed from the relatively innocuous title.  

 The two paintings, The March of the Guards To Finchly (1750) and O The Roast Beef of Old England: The Gate of Calais (1748) which opened the exhibition served to highlight both patriotism and ‘an allegory of English nationalism’ (cat. p.57). The complications of loyalty and shared values underlying the first painting and the xenophobic stereotypes of the second appeared to signal the antagonistic and derisive nature of British popular attitudes to the ‘foreigner’ and his culture.  At the same time, the first room demonstrated Hogarth’s familiarity with Chardin’s still lifes and Canaletto’s landscapes, so his ‘Europe’ was conceived as a complex relationship between both traditional antipathy and acknowledged mutual artistic heritage from the outset. The close focus on artists from only three other European cities offered a restricted continental frame of reference but it was nevertheless geographically broader than those covered by previous exhibitions of his work and a timely one for our current debates about nationhood. 

William Hogarth The March of the Guards to Finchley 1749 – 1750 [Public Domain]

The exhibition neatly introduced the cities under consideration through large maps which always irresistibly draw the viewer in for close inspection. The 1746 Jean Rocque A Plan of the Cities of London and Westminster with its tantalising dead-end alleyways (many in Fleet Street still in existence) penetrating the dense blocks of buildings along familiar London roads conjures up a sense of claustrophobic and fragile life in the city. Colleagues,  successful artist-immigrants and visitors from Europe, congregated with Hogarth around the new centres of artistic production such as St.Martin’s Lane, Soho and Golden Squares. A focus on the environments in which artists lived and worked, their studios and their practice foregrounded similarities  between Hogarth and artists such as Venetian Pietro Longhi (c.1701-1785), although the differences between them were more apparent. The wall label pointed to the analogies often made between their styles using the example of Longhi’s painting The Painter in His Studio (1741-4), but the catalogue insists that ‘Longhi’s work is completely devoid of the biting satire or moral imperative of Hogarth’s’ (p.49). The Amsterdam painter Cornelis Troost (1696-1750) was already known as the ‘Dutch Hogarth’ in the eighteenth century and examples of his work revealed the similar subjects and satirical treatment of contemporary life which both undertook. However, the catalogue once again asserts that Hogarth’s ‘vicious moralisations are light-years away from Troost’s gentle mockery ‘(p.63). French painter Étienne Jeaurat ((1699-1789) was interested in the everyday life of the Parisian streets in his 1757 Scene in the Streets of Paris among others. But although his subjects have much in common with Hogarth, the light touch of French rococo sensibility renders any darker underlying narratives less troubling than Hogarth’s palpable disquiet. The exhibition therefore drew these artists together but maintained their fundamental differences. 

Maps of Paris, Venice and Amsterdam introduced these cities with comments on the diversity of their populations in relation to London. Paris was the least diverse city but the exhibition was keen to emphasise the broad spectrum of artistic and artisan communities which lived alongside each other beyond the elite world of the Academy, suggesting a more inclusive ‘Hogarthian’ view than usually characterises studies of Parisian artistic practice. The maps themselves enabled vicarious participation in the intricate webs of connected city streets and their imagined communities. The newly important print trade expanded the possibilities for artistic success by reaching new audiences.  Hogarth’s series Four Times of the Day (1736-8) and Paul Sandby’s London Cries (1759) evoked London life, and its cosmopolitan credentials were represented in the exhibition by Canaletto’s views of the London Pleasure Gardens in 1751 and Marco Ricci’s opera rehearsal paintings.  

The exhibition emphasised the new freedoms which artists enjoyed in the cities it examined but these were gained at the expense of the ‘unfreedoms’ experienced by others. A wall panel pointed out that ‘This was an age of intellectual experimentation and innovation, but also materialism, moral uneasiness and hypocrisy’. The benefits of progress and enlightenment were mainly felt by ‘White men from the middle and upper classes’.  A room titled ‘In the Company of men’ brought together a selection of Hogarth’s paintings of groups of young men in compromising situations, usually as a result of heavy drinking and what might now be called ‘laddish’ behaviour. This included unfamiliar works such as A Night Encounter (1738-9) and Charity in the Cellar (1739), alongside the scandalous Sir Francis Dashwood at his Devotions (1733-9), which are all in private collections.  The catalogue points out that ‘The Hogarthian image flattered property-owning men’ whose confidence and entitlement allowed them to accept the lampoons with shared good humour. This room was preparatory to the theme of the most important section of the exhibition. 

The underlying message around which the exhibition narrative was constructed emerged, finally spelt out in a room labelled ‘Questioning Hogarth’. However, this had been repeatedly signalled early on, for example by the wall label accompanying Hogarth’s Self-Portrait painting the Comic Muse (c.1757-8) which suggested that the chair on which he sits was made from timber shipped from the colonies, ‘via routes which also shipped enslaved people’. It may therefore be read as standing in for ‘all those black and brown people enabling the society that supports his vigorous creativity’. Such metaphors are more likely to be appreciated now when we see the materiality of the eighteenth century as inextricably bound up with colonial and economic expansion but although Hogarth confronted and presented uncomfortable facts throughout his career, he surely did not share our outrage.  

The room ‘Questioning Hogarth’ was signposted by a warning about offensive images. Tate Britain cordoned off a similar room in the Aubrey Beardsley exhibition of 2020 and there was a furtive approach to Turner’s erotic drawings in the sectioned-off area of a Turner exhibition there many years ago. In Hogarth’s case, the racist and misogynistic themes covered in this room are familiar as part of current academic debate and the images sadly offered few surprises in their explicit treatment of the stereotypes which we now find unacceptable. They expanded on themes openly tackled by Hogarth which tend to be mentioned in exegetic accounts of individual paintings and prints but which are usually subtexts of the main subjects of his series.   

Here, the implicit messages attached to such images were examined and questioned as a broader cultural issue, for example through prints such as The Discovery (1743). Hogarth produced this for a private audience and did not publish it in his lifetime. His widow later destroyed the plate. A black woman, presumably a sex worker, is discovered in a bed by a group of white men. She is part of a surprise plot by the men, a substitute for the mistress of one of those shown in the print, John Highmore, who was a relation of Hogarth’s father-in-law. She herself may represent an ‘infamous London prostitute named Harriot’ (cat. p.135). These facts about the identification of the figures did not appear on the wall label written by Cora Gilroy-Ware. This instead dwelt on the translated quotation from Ovid’s Metamorphosis, ‘what was once white is now black’ which Hogarth added to the print in his own hand, and on ‘British views of Black women as embodiments of sex and shame’. The label noted that Hogarth’s treatment of the subject contrasts sharply with his observation in The Analysis of Beauty (1753) that aside from superficial skin types, ‘all people look fundamentally the same’. However, his text is more nuanced by his negative viewpoint that all mankind has ‘the same appearance’ when without the ‘upper skin’ they are ‘alike disagreeable to the eye’ (William Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997, p.88). He wrote his treatise to systematise his artistic practice and assert the authority of his art theories rather than as a clear statement about racial equality. The label proposed that, in the light of these stated contrasts, we re-evaluate the humanitarian principles which we readily attach to Hogarth’s reputation and consider him as a man of his times.  

Unusually in this exhibition, the wall labels gave voice to the personal views and observations of a range of curators, scholars and artists, a collaborative enterprise which challenged and disrupted an easy viewing of the exhibits and demanded uncomfortable engagement and deeper readings than many visitors might have expected. The ‘fragmentation’ embraced at the outset eventually proved to be a meandering, even serpentine form of engagement with Hogarth and his contemporaries, leading to statements about exploitation which now inform and underpin our understanding of Hogarth and his society.