William Hogarth

Hogarth was born into a lower-middle-class London family on 10 November 1697, and his father's imprisonment for debt—an episode that shadowed him—gave his work its hard edge. He apprenticed with an engraver but never finished, instead drawing on French and Italian influences to forge a new mode: satirical caricatures and what he called "modern moral subjects," realistic yet bawdy picture-sequences like A Harlot's Progress, A Rake's Progress, and Marriage A-la-Mode. Mass-produced as prints, they became wildly popular in his lifetime, and Charles Lamb later said you didn't just look at Hogarth's…