William Hogarth biography

Youth and early career

Hogarth—the only son of Richard Hogarth, a minor classical scholar and schoolmaster—grew up with two sisters, Mary and Ann, in the heart of the teeming city. Richard's evident abilities as a classicist brought him scant reward but provided an educated and industrious, if not prosperous, home. Later, looking back on this period, Hogarth dwelt almost exclusively on his father's shabby treatment at the hands of printers, booksellers, and wealthy patrons. Apart from confirming his distrust of learning, his resentment at his father's disappointing experiences fostered the boy's self-assertiveness and independence of character.

As a boy with little inclination to scholarship but gifted with a lively perception of the world around him, he enjoyed mimicking and drawing characters, interests that were encouraged by visits to a local painter's workshop. While not discouraging his artistic inclinations, his father, Hogarth later complained, could do little more “than put me in a way of shifting for myself.” He consequently sought the security of a solid craftsman's training and became apprenticed, at about the age of 15, to a silversmith. Hogarth presumably moved to his master's house, where he learned to engrave gold and silver work with armorial designs—in his own phrase, the “monsters of heraldry.” Valuable years lost on what the engraver George Vertue aptly termed “low-shrubb instructions” had crucial bearing on Hogarth's subsequent development. Apart from the insecurity they bred, Hogarth's frustration with his training led him to exploit unorthodox methods of self-instruction in order to make up for lost time. His originality and flexibility as an artist owed much to this pragmatic and unconventional approach to his career.

Hogarth's years of apprenticeship were by no means devoted exclusively to hard work, however. Sociable and fond of fun, a keen and humorous observer of human behaviour, with a special love of the theatre and shows of all kinds, he was evidently a convivial companion. Never prudish, he knew the exuberant life of the London streets, bawdy houses, fairs, and theatres firsthand and derived from them a fertile appreciation of the vitality of popular tradition. At the same time, he felt drawn to the coffeehouses and taverns frequented by writers, musicians, actors, and liberal professionals, forming lasting friendships in such lively intellectual circles. His sympathies rested with the middle classes and, specifically, with the critical, enlightened element—rational, tolerant, and humanitarian—that