William Hogarth (Bartholomew Close, London, November 10, 1697 – October 26, 1764) was a major English painter, printmaker, pictorial satirist, social critic and editorial cartoonist who has been credited with pioneering western sequential art. His work ranged from excellent realistic portraiture to comic strip-like series of pictures called "modern moral subjects". Much of his work, though at times vicious, poked fun at contemporary politics and customs.Hogarth lived in an age when artwork became increasingly commercialised and viewed in shop windows, taverns and public buildings and sold in print shops. Old hierarchies broke down, and new forms began to flourish: the ballad opera, the bourgeois tragedy, and especially, a new form of fiction called the novel with which authors such as Henry Fielding had great success. He drew from the highly moralising Protestant tradition of Dutch genre painting, and the very vigorous satirical traditions of the English broadsheet and other types of popular print. In England the fine arts had little comedy in them before Hogarth. His prints were expensive, and remained so until early nineteenth-century reprints brought them to a wider audience.
Hogarth died in London and was buried at St. Nicholas's Churchyard, Chiswick Mall in Chiswick. His friend the actor David Garrick wrote the inscription on his tombstone.
[Oil on canvas, 36 x 41.5 inches]
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