William Hogarth (1697-1765) was a remarkable painter and engraver whose works continue to have a profound influence on our ideas of eighteenth-century England in general and eighteenth-century London in particular. He created a new genre of pictorial narrative which were in fact early graphic novels. These pictorial narratives were a near-equivalent of the novels that established themselves as the new leading literary genre in the course of the eighteenth century. Both the novel and Hogarth’s Modern Moral Subjects were very much about a world their readers could relate to, telling a stories about people that could conceivably have been one’s neighbours, or at any rate the sort of people one could have come across in the streets of London: apprentices and aristocrats, rakes and prostitutes, criminals and homeless children.
In this seminar, we shall do close readings of Hogarth’s most important works. This will give us an opportunity to discuss what happens when we read such images (including specific difficulties we might face), and to consider various ways of reading them. We shall also look into reactions to and adaptations of Hogarth’s works from the eighteenth century to the present day.
Good high-resolution reproductions of many of Hogarth’s engravings can be found on the British Museum website
http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/search.aspx
Major paintings by Hogarth (such as the Marriage-a-la-Mode sequence) can be found on the website of the National Gallery, London.
You may also find a copy of a printed edition of his major works useful, such as:
Sean Shesgreen (ed.) Engravings by Hogarth (Dover Publications).
Please acquaint yourselves with A Harlot’s Progress and A Rake’s Progress – two of his most famous pictorial narratives – before the first session. |
