Facing widespread piracy of his popular prints, he pressed Parliament for a law protecting the copyrights of engravers. By 1735, however, he had become well known as a painter and engraver and, after the death of his father-in-law in 1734, had founded his own painting academy of St Martin’s Lane. Such experiences may help explain the social conscience always latent in Hogarth’s art. Apprenticed as a young man to the painter James Thornhill, he sought the hand of the artist’s daughter and had to elope with her when his marriage proposal was rejected. For several years, he, his sisters and his mother were obliged to live in a "debtors’ residence" next to the jail where his father was imprisoned after his bankruptcy. The artist is 38 years old, and has risen to the top of his profession as a painter and engraver despite a difficult and humiliating beginning. In the earlier one dated 1735 (from the Yale Center for British Art), Hogarth defines himself as young, ambitious and fashionable, wearing a wig and holding a palette. A moralist, he lived a paradox in that often his work dealt with his contemporaries’ sexual mores. The moralizing element is gone and in its place is a promise to the viewer of a salacious experience, not exactly what Hogarth’s work is supposed to be about.Īn innovator who railed against the prevailing taste for Italianate religious pictures, Hogarth picked his subjects from contemporary life rather than history, used the visual medium like a sociologist to explore and to criticize the mores of rich and poor alike, and popularized his ideas by selling engravings of the original works. Not only does this fragment emphasize Hogarth’s debt to French painting of the same era - the pink dress of the bride is pure 18th-century French fashion, the man’s frilly cuffs a very French aristocratic accoutrement - but the special cropping for the advertising poster limits a number of visual clues needed to interpret the narrative. In this rompish fragment from a painting in Hogarth’s series entitled "Le Mariage à la mode" (1743-1745), the manservant dressed in black exiting stage right, rolling his eyes and making a gesture of disapproval, has been cropped out. In Paris, the poster that served as a come-on for "Hogarth" featured a young couple in fashionable though somewhat disarrayed clothing, obviously exhausted from a night of sexual carousing, sprawled in separate chairs in front of a fireplace full of dying embers. His art is receiving renewed attention with a retrospective exhibition that was recently on view at the Musée du Louvre in Paris and that is soon to appear first at Tate Britain and then at La Caixa Forum in Madrid. The 18th-century English genre painter and engraver William Hogarth (1697-1764) has long been unfavorably compared to his French counterparts, Jean-Antoine Watteau, François Boucher and Jean-Honoré Fragonard, for an all too redundant moralizing and an overly painstaking attention to anecdotal detail.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |