Hogarth: A Life and a World

by Jenny Uglow

A landmark account of the great English artist's tumultuous life and times

William Hogarth (1697-1764) was perhaps London's greatest and best-known chronicler. The exuberant expansion and upheavals of city life furnished him with the subjects of the elaborate prints that made him famous, and that remain our finest and most fantastic visual record of eighteenth-century England.

Evoking Hogarth's fierce nationalism, his philanthropic vision, and his antagonistic dance with London's artists and patrons, Jenny Uglow's acclaimed biography "crackles with vitality and sparkles with insights" (Michael Holroyd). In the company of his friends and peers--Swift, Gay, Pope, and the rest--Hogarth burned to expose hypocrisy and yearned to be recognized as a painter in the grand old tradition. In decoding his work's details and damning references--to craven leaders and corrupt institutions, and the beloved, tragicomic tribulations of rakes, harlots, and common citizens--Uglow breathes life into his accomplishment and his thwarted ambition, showing herself at every turn "in sympathetic rapport with Hogarth the man" (P.N. Furbank, The New York Review of Books ).

Genres: Art, Biography, History, Art History, Nonfiction

794 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1997

About the author

Jennifer Sheila Uglow OBE (née Crowther, born 1947) is a British biographer, critic and publisher. The editorial director of Chatto & Windus, she has written critically acclaimed biographies of Elizabeth Gaskell, William Hogarth, Thomas Bewick and the Lunar Society, among others, and has also compiled a women's biographical dictionary.

Reviews

[Ollie · Rating 5 out of 5]

William Hogarth was one of the greatest English men to live, or at least Jenny Uglow makes a very convincing case for this. After having finished this biography, I’m inclined to agree.

Uglow does exactly what a historian should do: she brings to life the world her subject lives in while exploring various themes that resonate with us today. She has a fitting subject in Hogarth. He was a talented and proud artist, perhaps even worthy of being called the grandfather of English art - definitely the first big English illustrator and painter. He was a self-made man, climbing his way up from simple origins, but never losing sight of where he came from. More impressively, he never completely bowed to the privileged who he relied on for the sales of his work. He built his reputation on taking down the arrogant and rich with his satirical illustrations, sometimes to the detriment of his career.

Hogarth lived through the first half of the 18th century and was instrumental in setting up two things that we now take for granted: arts academies (he set up St. Martin's Lane Academy, a precursor of the Royal Academy) and charities (he was one of Captain Thomas Coram’s main supporters in setting up the Foundling Hospital in 1741.) Jenny Uglow subtly compares Hogarth and Coram to each other, who were friends and represented the rise of a type of hardworking, rags-to-riches Englishmen who were also patriotic and compassionate. One of Hogarth's masterpieces, a portrait of Thomas Coram, hung at the hospital’s entrance, and even the hospital's first printed papers used a design by Hogarth on their header.

Uglow goes through every important work in Hogarth’s career (the book is filled with many images of them), explaining their context and importance. But what really grabbed me was the Enlightenment world he lived in. Sir Isaac Newton, Voltaire, Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift were his contemporaries. Near the end of his life, Benjamin Franklin showed interest in his work. Other interesting facts and stories that crop up in the biography:

- English society was divided in three group types: prostitutes, people who used them and people who knew them. Venereal diseases were a major preoccupation and a central topic in the coffee shops that had just appeared in London and were all the rage. Prostitutes painted disease spots on their bodies with black ink, making them look like Dalmatians. They feature a lot in Hogarth's work.
- Homosexuality was acceptable in private. Male whorehouses, known as “Molly Houses”, were just as popular as their female equivalent, and although sodomy wasn’t legal, punishment wasn’t as severe as centuries later.
- There was a lot of singing all over London, all the time. The news was delivered through broadside ballads, which people bought in the morning on cheap paper and learnt the tune from the seller. They'd then walk away humming the tune, to memorise it, while learning the ballads to share with friends and family later, which could be about anything from love and religion to current political issues or disasters. This made me think of the explosion of popular music in Britain in the 20th Century and how it's actually something in the island’s blood.
- A “celebrity”, Mary Toft, fooled the great physicians of the time by making them believe she was giving birth to rabbits. She was a sort of ancestor to Darren Brown.
- A favourite past time of royalty in London was to come out and watch fires destroying homes, and even try to help put them out.

Just as I was finishing this biography, I stayed at a friend's in West London, not too far from Hogarth's Chiswick country home. It's now a museum worth visiting; you get an idea of where he escaped to when he needed a bit of countryside, and where he lived with his family towards the end of his life. A mulberry tree from his lifetime still stands in his garden. It was nice to see it and imagine whether Hogarth used to sit underneath it as he worked on his sketches.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

Uglow provides vivid depictions and highly engaging of Hogarth, his world, his actions in that world and his responses to it. HIghly recommended.

[Karen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic non-fiction read on the great 18th century painter, Hogarth (1697-1764). Painter, printmaker, satirist & cartoonist who started out as an engraver, who made merry with his subjects (London's rakes, harlots and common citizens) in his paintings. Grew up poor in the Covent Garden area in London, his Latin, school teacher father was thrown into debtor's prison when he couldn't get his Latin dictionarys to sell or his "Latin" coffee houses to take off. Perhaps this is one of the inspirations Charles Dickens felt for Hogarth (many years later), when hanging Hogarth's series of "Rake's Progress" (of which I have a copy of print #4) in his hallway. In 1757, he was appointed Serjeant Painter to the King and was a founding Governor of the Foundling Hospital which was instrumental in getting orphans off the streets of London. Near the end of his life, he was communicating with Benjamin Franklin as Franklin was interested in his works. Many of his original works can be viewed today at the National Portrait Gallery, The Tate Gallery and the Sir John Soane's Museum. Sadly, many of his copper plates were melted down during WWI to make bombs. A great read and a great author.

[Peter Ellwood · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have to record, ruefully, that this book got the better of me. Shame on me, because I had been encouraged to give Hogarth a whirl, having read Jenny Uglow’s delightful The Lunar Men.

And it started out so well. Opening this edition felt a little like being welcomed back by an old friend:

“If you cross the open space of Southfield, heading north towards the long sheds of the market, and cast a look over your shoulder, suddenly the golden cross on top of St Paul’s Cathedral glints over the roofs of St Bartholemew’s Hospital to the south”…

And whoosh! - off she goes. The first few chapters simply writhe with the images of London, the hubbub and hurly burly, the hustle and bustle of the streets, the bright kaleidoscope of what London was like in those post-Great Fire Years, as the capital got back on its feet, burgeoning and growing like billy-o. In some ways the book is as much a biography of Georgian London with Hogarth as a kind of leitmotif muse, as vice versa. In this book, they are co-stars. It was quite striking to me how vibrant and ‘advanced’ London was in those early years of the century, with artists and writers getting together to share knowledge (and occasional hostilities), entrepreneurs rising up to make fortunes and South Sea Bubbles, coffee houses and societies. We tend to assume that our own generation has it all, that – well, it was we who invented the Internet and look at how quickly things change these days; aren’t we special – and so on. But JU’s vivid storytelling makes it strikingly clear that London has been like that, bursting with innovation and life, for centuries. Scrumptious!

Scrumptious – but…

… but by page 200 I began to realise that this glorious riot of detail was going to go on, relentlessly, for another 500 pages. Open it at page 300 or 400 and the suspicion is confirmed. Plus ça change, as it were. I loved it, but somehow I just ran out of poop. Never mind, I shall put the book aside for a rainy day and try again.