Hogarth often observed, and Lamb certainly agreed with him, that making people laugh was hard work. He always worked hard himself. He had to. Life and livelihood, to him, never came easy, from birth to death. His father was an ambitious autodidact from the north of England, who had nothing more than a grammar school education but became a passable classical scholar. He came south to set up a school but lacked the capital to make it work. He compiled a Latin dictionary but was cheated and bamboozled by rascally bookseller-publishers, of whom there were plenty in eighteenth-century London. So he opened a coffeehouse, whose feature was that everyone there was expected to speak Latin. There was a huge table in the middle covered in pamphlets, with men sitting around, leaning on their elbows, and learning. A good idea, and popular, but not profitable, and since old Hogarth had borrowed money to set it up, he was arrested, marched into a “sponging house,” and spent the last few years of his life in debtors’ prison.

This tragedy overshadowed Hogarth’s early life (as it did for Dickens exactly a century later), but it did not deter him from upward striving. He was just as ambitious as his father, and wanted to be a great man. But he was much more cautious, and realistic. He never borrowed a penny unless he absolutely had to. He never trusted anyone. He ran his own affairs, was his own master in all things, paid cash, saved his money, and acquired basic business skills. He was determined to be an artist, for he loved drawing and got some lessons in painting at an academy in St. Martin’s Lane, off Leicester Fields. He also, to ensure he made a living and could pay his bills, got himself apprenticed to an engraver and learned this difficult craft thoroughly. He was thus able to engrave all his own works, until he was successful enough to employ the best Paris engravers, who had a sophisticated touch then unknown in London. Always he was overshadowed by the fear of prison, which often makes an appearance in his works, sometimes openly, more often by implication, as a threat just around the corner. It was his lifelong terror that he would end up as his father did.

But he had one stroke of superb luck. He went to work for Sir James Thornhill, the muralist, who without being a genius was a thorough professional who taught Hogarth a lot, and was industrious, workmanlike, and helpful in all things. Moreover, he had a beautiful daughter, Jane, who was also highly intelligent and understood business thoroughly, and he fell in love with her. She returned his love, but old Thornhill was opposed at first, thinking Hogarth a nobody. However, at Jane’s strenuous urging, he looked carefully into Hogarth’s work, working hours, and productivity, and decided “he will do.” They made a perfect couple, for Jane loved his work and helped him in every way she could. She sat for him on many occasions, notably as the kneeling woman in his first successful picture, a scene from the hit play The Beggar’s Opera, as the tempted lady in The Lady’s Last Stake, and above all (I believe) as The Shrimp Girl, the superb oil sketch which has become his most popular work. His sense of humor was hers too, and she said, “Mr. Hogarth loves to laugh, and he has taught the world to laugh with him.” After his death she kept his flame burning steadily by organizing the sales of his paintings and the reissue of his prints. She was the perfect wife for the professional man, and I salute her. Hogarth was also fortunate in that he is the subject of two of the best essays in the English language, by Lamb and Hazlitt; and in our own time, the American scholar Ronald Paulson has devoted to him the best three-volume biography written about any eighteenth-century Englishman (see Further Reading section).

Hogarth was one of the most versatile artists in history. His work includes large-and small-scale murals, individual and group portraits, conversation pieces, historical paintings, and studies of modes and manners. Some of his self-portraits are masterpieces, especially his own favorite, showing himself and his pug, which brings out their affinity. He was himself, as he said, “dogged”; also brave, tenacious, and faithful, and he looked the part. He was widely known as Pug or Puggy, and was proud of it. He liked similarly pugnacious characters, and his best portraits are of such people: Benjamin Hoadly, bishop of Winchester; Thomas Herring, archbishop of Canterbury; the Welsh mathematician William Jones of the Royal Society; Captain Thomas Coram, who set up the Foundling Hospital in London (which still exists as a museum that houses some of Hogarth’s best work); and even a pugnacious woman, Mrs. Salter, one of the finest and most truthful presentations of an ordinary lady we possess. Hogarth’s small-scale portrait of the successful merchant George Arnold is the quintessence of the self-confident spirit of independence which was so characteristic of the mid-eighteenth century. These works are not exactly funny. But they make one smile; they are so truthful to unadorned humanity. They can be moving too: Hogarth’s portrait-heads of his six servants on the same canvas is a virtuoso exercise in gentle and generous truth telling.

However, the core of Hogarth’s work is his moral paintings, in which he sought to tell the truth about English society in the hope of reforming it. It was his view that the truth is both tragic and comic, and both aspects are essential. In order to direct his moral message at the largest possible public, he usually presented it in a series of connected images, a story, first painted (for sale to wealthy individual collectors), then engraved (usually by himself) for mass sale in the print shops. The central characters are usually tragic, the peripheral ones comic. Sometimes the story is told in two images, more often in four or six. Thus, in Gin Lane and Beer Street (unusual in that it was never painted but went straight into engraved form), he contrasts the evils of cheap gin with the healthy normality of English beer. In Before and After, he shows an ardent lover striving purposefully to have sexual intercourse with a reluctant, but also excited, maid; and the disarray, both in their clothing and emotions, after he has succeeded. There is nothing objectively funny in either of these two pairs, indeed Gin Lane contains much that is tragic, even horrible, and the seduction pair suggests much trouble ahead for both parties as a result of their surrender to passion or lust. But we get great humorous pleasure from both: from their humanity, jovial truthfulness, and confidentiality. We are glad to see what is happening, and glad it is not happening to us; so we can laugh in safety. The safe laugh at the expense of a sad world is one of the chief effects a professional humorist seeks to bring about, and it was Hogarth’s principal strength.

His grand stories number four: Times of Day, A Harlot’s Progress, A Rake’s Progress, and Marriage à-la-mode. On these his fame principally rests. With them, he founded an English school of painting, and they have become part of the English artistic heritage. The four Times, Morning, Noon, Evening, and Night, are essentially street scenes, with realistic urban or suburban backgrounds, and an immense variety of characters: bucks and their floozies, screaming and unhappy children, negligent buxom servants having their breasts stroked and so pouring the dishes they carry on to the street, sweating middle-aged women, rheumatic old men, censorious old maids, and gawkers, mendicants, tradesmen, even barbers shaving. Hogarth manages to convey cold, greed, anger, jealousy, envy, and lust as part of the everyday experience of Londoners on the streets. It is an early work (1738) and the painting is sometimes crude. But it is also forceful, direct, uncompromising, and driven forward with single-minded energy. The images strike home and imprint themselves on the mind. It is fierce human comedy—no punches pulled—but we can laugh: we are not in the streets, shivering or broiling, or having hot soup poured on our heads, but safe at home, chuckling.

A Harlot’s Progress has a central character, a country maid, being seduced into vice by a procuress, throwing away her chances of wealth by intemperate behavior, being arrested for debt, doing hard labor in prison, and finally ending up in her coffin. It is a six-scene series of sustained power and brilliance, in which the structure of center-tragic, periphery-comic is brought to maturity, especially in the finale. Here, with the harlot in her open coffin, there are fourteen characters in the room, all theoretically mourners but none caring tuppence for the dead woman, and enjoying themselves or acting their grief with varying degrees of humbug. The key character is the parson, sitting next to a handsome woman. His face expresses piety but his right hand has strayed under her skirts and is feeling her naked thigh. She does not give him away but directs at the viewer a glance of complicity, as if to say, “What a hypocrite this dreadful old clergyman is.” This comic device, which I call the Complicity Stare, in which the participant communes directly with the viewer/reader, was well-known on the stage, going back to Shakespeare. But this is the first time it is used in European pictorial art, and is a scintillating debut. It was to have a great future, not only in graphic humor but, more important, in the cinema, where Oliver Hardy brought it to perfection in his silent shorts. In this case, the parson’s misbehavior is not just a secret between himself and the lady he is fingering. An old woman on his left has noticed what he is up to, and is scowling horribly. Maybe she is about to make a fuss and expose him. Hogarth at his best not only tells you what has just happened, but suggests what is about to happen, so the viewer is present at a moment in time of a dynamic story.

Marriage à-la-mode, the most popular of the moral series tales, at the time and since, shows what happens when the heir of an impoverished nobleman marries the daughter of a rich businessman, for convenience. Every episode has its outstanding qualities, but the one in which the husband discovers his wife in adultery with her lover, and is mortally wounded by him, takes the prize. It is the first visual presentation of a joke, already in use on the stage, which was to become a stock image of early cinema: the lover, minus his breeches, escaping through a window. It is a conceit which never fails to draw laughs. Hogarth manifestly enjoyed pioneering it, and Mack Sennett used it time and again in the silent days of Hollywood. Again, Laurel and Hardy, devoted students of Hogarth, took it up, and used it at least three times. In one version, the pair are in an empty street where Laurel, by mistake, fires a shot. At once, every upper window in the street opens, and scores of lovers, each trouserless, drop to the ground and run for it, each fearing the angry shotgun of an outraged husband. Here (one feels) Hogarth would have laughed to see his concept taken up with such energy.

Hogarth supplemented his series satires with a number of one-off subjects, some of superlative quality: Strolling Actresses Dressing in a Barn, The Enraged Musician, The March to Finchley, The Cockpit (or Pit Ticket), and Southwark Fair. The last contains twenty-two separate incidents and requires considerable information to be “read” properly. Actresses must have been done from life and is rich in sexuality and inside knowledge of the theater. The Musician illustrates eleven different kinds of annoying sounds. Indeed noise plays a leading part in many of Hogarth’s concepts. The March illustrates the propensity of soldiers to beget illegitimate children, in itself tragic but cranked up by Hogarth’s imagination into a boisterous comedy. All these works are chaos pictures, events getting out of control in a comic fashion: in Southwark Fair, a roof and scaffolding collapse, upending an actress and exposing her naked thighs, and in The Cockpit the crowd is chaotically insensate with greed and partisanship, a blind man in the middle being the only sign of calm; this too was done from life. Not all Hogarth’s moral stories are of equal merit. Industry and Idleness and The Four Stages of Cruelty, though ingeniously conceived and powerful in conception, were engraved quickly and cheaply for a low-price popular market (no paintings) and lack sophistication.

On the other hand, Hogarth’s satire on political elections, from major paintings done in the mid-1750s, represent the peak of his art. The satire was inspired by disgraceful doings in Oxford a year before, and Hogarth aimed to expose the full panoply of corruption whereby men got into the House of Commons, and parties, especially the Whigs, got into power. The first of these, An Election Entertainment, is Hogarthian comedy at its most direct, brutal, and bizarre. It involves nearly forty characters, and is painted with exceptional skill and daring. Most of the characters are drunk. One of the two candidates is embraced by a disgusting, gin-sodden old woman, while a drunken man empties the ashes of his pipe on his wig. The candidate’s wife is sandwiched between two yokels, one of whom sings while holding his glass of wine over her head. The second candidate desperately tries to entertain three drunks by turning his hand into a baby’s head (a trick Hogarth himself loved to perform). The mayor, fainting from a surfeit of oysters, has his head bathed, and one of the Whig street ruffians, hit on the head with a brick, has raw spirits poured into the wound by a fellow rough. Bricks, hurled by Tory opponents from the street outside, whizz through the open window, and one has just knocked over the party lawyer, who has been adding up the number of “certain” votes from a poll book. A clergyman takes off his wig to mop his bald head, while a bagpipe, violin, and bull fiddle sound off behind him. Drink is available, literally, in great tubs. Some of the faces are bestial in their vile distortions, and the noise, stench, belching, and cries of glee and derision are almost palpable. The candidates are part of the ruling class but, come election time, they are made to pay for it briefly by sucking up to the people in all their vulgar enormity—and that is what the painting is about. Here, indeed, is the putative democracy in which Britain, alone in the world, rejoiced, and Hogarth shows it in all its naked turpitude.

The final picture in the election series, Chairing the Member, shows the process complete. The Whigs have won, and one of them, now an MP, is being carried in triumph through the streets. But his posture is precarious, for his bearers are drunk, and a huge sow and her piglets have charged through their legs. The MP in fact is about to be precipitated into the stream which flows through the little town. Two partisans, an agricultural laborer with a flail and a one-legged sailor with a truncheon, fight it out in the foreground. To the left, Whig grandees feast their victory at the inn, while on the right a lady faints, while a little boy urinates onto the head of a monkey,itself on the shoulders of a dancing bear. The huge panorama of chaos, with about fifty figures, is composed with great art and terrific gusto—the central item of the chaired member introducing the new Hogarthian device of the tottering tower, about to collapse, a comic invention which was to appear again and again in British art, and is the acme and culmination of the chaotic spirit. In the bottom right-hand corner, a blind, bearded fiddler strums away at a postelection jig of joy—Hogarth never omits to put in the sound effects.

There is no doubt about the general success of Hogarth’s work, based as it was on a combination of social satire, acute observation, and truthful comedy. He found England essentially a country without a school of art, dependent on imported masters. He left it with a distinctive tone of voice, all its own, preparing the way for Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough, the Royal Academy, and the great school of watercolor painters. I am not saying that all were influenced by him, though many were. What is true, however, is that Hogarth gave the British artist self-confidence. He asserted, on every possible occasion, and in his writings, especially his major work, The Analysis of Beauty, and in his “Apology for Painters,” which directly addresses the state of the arts in Britain, that his countrymen had the talent to produce the best, and had no need to bring foreign artists to London. He publicly attacked those, like William Kent (the interior designer and furniture maker), who took all their ideas (he said) from France and Italy. All British artists needed was a fair chance. Thus he published two pamphlets (around 1733) demanding copyright protection for engravers, designers, and etchers, and was the leading spirit in getting a protective statute through Parliament in 1735. This transformed the trade, led to a print shop opening at every street corner in fashionable London, and made the careers of Thomas Rowlandson, James Gillray, George Cruikshank, and countless others possible. He also admitted the need for systematic training, and set up an art school for that purpose. But he opposed the idea of what later became the Royal Academy, with its art school, all under royal patronage. He thought such patronage, as in France, would lead to artists kowtowing to the state and those who ruled it. He was indeed all for private enterprise, in the arts as in everything else, and could have given some points to Adam Smith, then a young man, for his future Wealth of Nations. He wanted the arts to flourish in a thoroughly English way: free, independent, nationalistic, and popular, but without being too democratic, for he was horribly aware, as his pictures show, how badly the common people could behave. He was inclined to be xenophobic. On his only trip abroad, he was arrested, as a spy, for drawing the fortifications of Calais. He responded with one of his best canvases, O the Roast Beef of Old England (or The Gate of Calais), showing himself at work, skeletal ...