William Hogarth (1697-1764) was born to Richard Hogarth, a provincial schoolmaster turned London coffee house owner, and his wife, Anne, in Bartholomew Close Parish, London. His family moved about London frequently with his father’s unsteady income. At times Hogarth’s mother sold home remedies and sewing to bring in extra money. When Hogarth was ten, his father was imprisoned for debt, and were it not for Parliament agreeing to a general amnesty for those who were in debt for ₤ 50 or less, his stay would have been longer. The insecurities of Hogarth’s childhood made an impression on him, and they would turn up later in his art in such form as quack potions, debtor’s prisons, unsavory neighborhoods, and malevolent, foolish authority figures.

Apprenticed to a silver engraver, in 1718, the year his father died, Hogarth set up shop as a copper engraver on his own, making business cards and the like. However, he quickly extended his oeuvre by attempting more ambitious subjects. A master of the satiric use of emblems, he resuscitated an exhausted medium through cautionary tales of contemporary themes that emphasized movement over static form. Early successes include the moralistic South Sea Scene and The Lottery from the early 1720s, satirizing the contemporary Londoners’ desire to dabble in speculative wealth. Later he would become famous for his series narratives, which usually originated as oil paintings and later reproduced in prints that told a story over time, much like framed tableaux for theater, such as The Harlot’s Progress (1731), The Rake’s Progress (1735), and Marriage à la Mode (1743). In 1751, his observant eye caught the misery created by cheap hard liquor in the companion pieces Gin Lane and the mercantile optimism of Beer Street. Similarly, The Progress of Cruelty addresses the difficult subjects of animal and human rights.

A champion of industry and creativity, Hogarth had fought for an early version of the copyright law in 1735 in order to curb pirated editions of his prints. In addition to his industrious practicality, however, Hogarth also aspired to influence artistic theory by writing a treatise on art that celebrated the fluid serpentine form, what he called "the line of beauty." The resulting book, Analysis of Beauty (1753), was but one expression of his long time desire to establish a major British academy of art that would train home grown artists that could compete on an equal, if not greater, standing with the French academy, the artistic school with the greatest reputation of time. Contemporary critics dismissed his theories as derivative and overreaching. Although his formal art education was spotty, he took over the administration of the local London academy founded by his father-in-law, Sir James Thornhill, when the latter died. Hogarth’s efforts to create a British artistic consciousness were visionary and lasting at a time when "real art" was more often imported from continental Europe. We can get a glimpse of Hogarth’s British pugnacity in his Battle of the Paintings, a title borrowed from Jonathan Swift’s Battle of the Books. In this Hogarth work, European masterworks or their forged copies are being tossed out of the window wholesale. It was an optimistic vision, but Hogarth was wrong in anticipating that his works would be the replacement.

Although Hogarth prided himself on his oil history paintings, such as his Pool of Bethesda (1735), he is best known today for his social and political satiric prints on conditions affecting eighteenth century England. Although these highly detailed and chaotic prints tend sometimes to leave the modern casual viewer lost, their topicality was not lost on his contemporaries. In a series of election paintings and prints, for example, Hogarth tells multiple stories at once, commenting on the current political escapades of his day with satiric humor. Hogarth desired that his wider audience learn to appreciate his works as more than what current gossip and celebrity spotting could deliver. In order that the viewer not miss the moral lesson of his prints, Hogarth often provided a detailed explication of his works as captions under the text. The technique was not new, but in Hogarth’s hands these captions provide a curious scientific objectivity to the often lurid scenes enacted above.

Patriotism for Hogarth did not mean seeing his fellow countrymen idealistically. Although he did paint commissioned portraits, such as in 1741 when he produced the The Graham Children and portraits of his friend, the great Shakespearean actor, David Garrick, such as Garrick as Richard III, Hogarth’s insistence on painting what he observed without flattery limited his appeal as a portrait painter. While he desired to be remembered as a serious artist of history painting, rather than as a printer of satirical paintings that appealed to a mass audience, his continued success depends on the latter. However, the topicality of his satire was a target for the critics who saw him as more artisan than artist. He continued to defend his standing to the final year of his life. That his critics struck a nerve can be seen in Hogarth’s late works. One of these, created in response to Charles Churchill, Called The Bruiser (1763), is particularly striking. In it, Hogarth replaced his own self portrait with that of a dressed bear raising a tankard of ale. Only the pug remains from the self-confident The Artist and His Pug of 1745. His final completed work is dated from 1764. He called it The Tailpiece, or Bathos. In it he returns even more explicitly to the emblematic tradition of his engraver training. It is clear that Hogarth diagnosed the current of criticism as more than a personal attack. He viewed it no less than as the destructive assault of critical mediocrity into the elevated subject of art, resulting in devastation in the wake of disorder. The landscape portrays the blasted aftermath of apocalypse. He died on October 26, 1764 at the age of sixty-six, active and abrasive to the end.