Hogarth's Dilemma

Abstract

We do not immediately think of Hogarth as a portrait painter— and neither did his contemporaries. They both celebrated and attacked him as the painter and engraver of satiric progresses, a form of moral history that he created with the publication of A Harlot's Progress in 1732. But Hogarth nourished higher ambitions, hoping to play a latter-day Van Dyck to Sir James Thornhill's Rubens. Like Van Dyck, however, he was disappointed in his quest for major religious commissions and was forced to rely, instead, on what he could do best within the existing artistic marketplace. In 1733 he placed a “Van Dyck's Head” as the sign above his studio door, and he turned increasingly towards portraiture from 1738 to 1743 and then again in 1757, when he announced that he would “employ the rest of his Time in PORTRAIT PAINTING chiefly” and boasted that he could complete a full portrait from four fifteen-minute sittings. It should not surprise us, then, that the most recent catalogue of his paintings lists well over one hundred individual and group portraits, or that Hogarth's portraiture and his other work as an artist interpenetrate at almost every turn in his career.