Word: hogarths
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Rowlandson's raffish lampoons showed a corrupt but essentially comic world in which everyone was either too fat or too thin. Plump, pug-faced William Hogarth was perhaps harder to take. With less wit, he had gone deeper into the cynical, sensual, swaggering spirit of his time, and used his engraving tools, like a moral surgeon, to lay bare the malignant tumors of cruelty, ignorance and greed...
...week found themselves on a rubberneck tour of 18th-Century London. They peered into brawling alleys and elegant, candlelit drawing rooms; into prisons where the whipping posts were "the reward of idleness" and cockpits where the gamblers seemed more ferocious than the cocks. The tour conductors: blunt, biting William Hogarth, ribald Thomas Rowlandson...
Britannia's Progress. Said Hogarth: "My picture is my stage, and men and women my players, who, by means of certain actions and gestures, are to exhibit a dumb show." His two greatest "dumb shows," Harlot's Progress and Rake's Progress, sold like fish & chips but, in an age when only portraits or "historical" paintings in the grand manner were considered Art, the connoisseurs ignored them. And because the characters were real enough to recognize, no one thought of comparing either series of engravings with Bunyan's great book...
...comparison was obvious and presumably intended. Just as Bunyan's "Christian" wound up in the City of God, so Hogarth's "Tom Rakewell" awoke from the happy madness of Drury Lane's Rose Tavern to the chains of the miserably insane in Bedlam. The year he died (1763), Hogarth added a final bitter detail to this engraving: a ha'penny stuck against the wall to indicate that Britannia was also an inmate...
...collection of 18th-Century prints (Hogarth and English Caricature; Transatlantic Arts Co.; $4.50), published in London, was available at U.S. bookstores last week. It might surprise 20th-Century readers to learn how much political cartoonists of that day got away with...