William Hogarth

William Hogarth was a famous painter and engraver in the 18th century. He became well-known after the publication of the first of his 'modern moral subjects'; a series of 6 engravings named 'A Harlot's Progress'. This was then followed by 'A Rake's Progress'.

In 'A Harlot's Progress' the miserable fate of a prostitute is narrated through six scenes; from her becoming a prostitute, to her death, and funeral. After the success of this series, Hogarth created 'A Rake's Progress'; in which eight pictures depicted the life of a rich merchant's son, who wasted all of his money on gambling and living luxuriously, and ended up in Bedlam Hospital.

Hogarth's work was very popular and was printed numerous times, because it was a comment on society at that time. Hogarth depicted society from a satirical viewpoint; one which was much more rarely shown at the time. He was the equivalent to a social/documentary photographer, or journalist, in today's terms. He drew inspiration from culture and subjects around him.

I am interested in this idea of depicting real-life society, the culture and shared experiences of what's going on around me. Although I have been working on creating a narrative within large-scale collages, I am now interested in creating a larger series of paintings, which create a narrative through the solitary images, in the same way that Hogarth's does. With Hogarth's images, the viewer can fill in the narrative themselves; which was obviously much more familiar and everyday to viewers at the time; adding to their pool of collective/shared memory, in the same way that photographs do today.