William Hogarth

English painter, printmaker, pictorial satirist, social critic and editorial cartoonist (1697-1764)

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Lived 1697–1764, aged 67

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Wikipedia
73 languages
Cross-language footprint
Era
1697–1764
Aged 67

Summary

Updated 2026-06-09

His picture-stories of harlots, rakes, and disastrous marriages turned 18th-century London's vices into serialized morality tales so sharp that political cartoons in his vein are still called "Hogarthian."

Biography

About

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…

Voice

In their own words

Sourced, dated quotes from William Hogarth

William Hogarth

said1753

Any two opposite colours of the rainbow (eg yellow and blue) , form a third between them, thus imparting to each other their peculiar qualities .

— The Analysis of Beauty (1753)

William Hogarth

said1753

A great many people seem to delight most in what they least understand.

— The Analysis of Beauty (1753)

William Hogarth

saidundated

After the March to Finchley, the next print I engraved, was the Roast Reef of old England; which took its rise from a visit I paid to France the preceding year.

— John Ireland, Hogarth Illustrated, Volume III (3rd edn., 1812), pp. 340-341

William Hogarth

saidundated