William hogarth brief biography examples

William Hogarth November 10, — October 26, was an English painter , printmaker , pictorial satirist , social critic, and editorial cartoonist who has been credited with pioneering western sequential art.

William hogarth medium

In his illustrated treatise "The Analysis of Beauty," Hogarth argued that aesthetic appreciation was not just the preserve of the elite connoisseur but belonged as well to the average person, and he drew on everyday life and often comic examples to democratize the artistic enterprise. Hogarth's best-known works depicted the poverty and moral squalor of eighteenth-century London.

His visceral pictorial dramas not only mirrored London street life but inferred many of the causes of social ills in politically charged art that challenged class, gender, and racial inequities in an age of British colonial expansion. Hogarth satirized the pretensions of politicians, industrialists, and clerics, but also sympathetically depicted the "common people," specifically working women: seamstresses, milkmaids, fish-girls, and other occupations.

The son of a poor school teacher and textbook writer, William Hogarth was born at Bartholomew Close, in London , on November 10, In his youth, he was apprenticed to the engraver Ellis Gamble in Leicester Fields, where he learned to engrave trade cards and similar products. He disliked the drudgery of copying the designs of others, however, and after seeing the late baroque paintings at Saint Paul's Cathedral and Greenwich Hospital, he conceived of an ambition to become a history painter.

Hogarth also took a lively interest in the street life of the metropolis and the London fairs, and amused himself by sketching the characters he saw. During his apprenticeship Hogarth developed a system of visual mnemonics, a strategy to improve his memory that enabled him to recall people and scenes which had made an impression on him.

Around the same time, his father, who had opened an unsuccessful Latin-speaking coffee house at St John's Gate, was imprisoned for debt in Fleet Prison for five years.