33 Facts About William Hogarth

William Hogarth was an English painter, engraver, pictorial satirist, social critic, editorial cartoonist and occasional writer on art.

William Hogarth's father underwent periods of mixed fortune, and was at one time imprisoned in lieu of outstanding debts, an event that is thought to have informed William's paintings and prints with a hard edge.

William Hogarth was born at Bartholomew Close in London to Richard Hogarth, a poor Latin school teacher and textbook writer, and Anne Gibbons.

Young William Hogarth took a lively interest in the street life of the metropolis and the London fairs, and amused himself by sketching the characters he saw.

In 1720, William Hogarth enrolled at the original St Martin's Lane Academy in Peter Court, London, which was run by Louis Cheron and John Vanderbank.

William Hogarth attended alongside other future leading figures in art and design, such as Joseph Highmore, William Kent, and Arthur Pond.

William Hogarth became a member of the Rose and Crown Club, with Peter Tillemans, George Vertue, Michael Dahl, and other artists and connoisseurs.

William Hogarth continued that theme in 1727, with the Large Masquerade Ticket.

In 1726, William Hogarth prepared twelve large engravings illustrating Samuel Butler's Hudibras.

William Hogarth might have printed Burlington Gate, evoked by Alexander Pope's Epistle to Lord Burlington, and defending Lord Chandos, who is therein satirized.

In 1731, William Hogarth completed the earliest of his series of moral works, a body of work that led to wide recognition.

William Hogarth has to describe the negotiations for a marriage pending between the daughter of a rich citizen Alderman and young Lord Viscount Squanderfield, the dissipated son of a gouty old Earl.

William Hogarth's coach has overturned with a heavy load and his horse is lying on the ground, having broken its leg.

William Hogarth is beating it with the handle of his whip; its eye severely wounded.

Horace Walpole wrote that William Hogarth had run a great risk to go there since the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle.

William Hogarth claimed to have painted himself into the picture in the left corner sketching the gate, with a "soldier's hand upon my shoulder", running him in.

In 1745, William Hogarth painted a self-portrait with his pug dog, Trump, which shows him as a learned artist supported by volumes of Shakespeare, Milton and Swift.

In 1757, William Hogarth was appointed Serjeant Painter to the King.

William Hogarth wrote and published his ideas of artistic design in his book The Analysis of Beauty.

William Hogarth lived in an age when artwork became increasingly commercialized, being viewed in shop windows, taverns, and public buildings, and sold in printshops.

William Hogarth drew from the highly moralizing Protestant tradition of Dutch genre painting, and the very vigorous satirical traditions of the English broadsheet and other types of popular print.

William Hogarth's prints were expensive, and remained so until early 19th-century reprints brought them to a wider audience.

Indeed, William Hogarth was a Deist, a believer in a God who created the universe but takes no direct hand in the lives of his creations.

William Hogarth rejected Lord Shaftesbury's then-current ideal of the classical Greek male in favour of the living, breathing female.

Sir James saw the match as unequal, as William Hogarth was a rather obscure artist at the time.

However, when William Hogarth started on his series of moral prints, A Harlot's Progress, some of the initial paintings were placed either in Sir James' drawing room or dining room, through the conspiring of Jane and her mother, in the hopes of reconciling him with the couple.

William Hogarth was a founding Governor of the Foundling Hospital.

William Hogarth passed away around two hours later, in the arms of his servant, Mrs Mary Lewis.

William Hogarth was buried at St Nicholas Church, Chiswick, now in the west of London.

William Hogarth's works were a direct influence on John Collier, who was known as the "Lancashire William Hogarth".

William Hogarth influenced many caricaturists of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries.

William Hogarth was the lead character in Nick Dear's play The Art of Success, whilst he is played by Toby Jones in the 2006 television film A Harlot's Progress.

William Hogarth's House in Chiswick, west London, is a museum; the major road junction next to it is named the William Hogarth Roundabout.