William Hogarth's The March to Finchley and the fate of comic history painting

Abstract

Completed in 1750, William Hogarth's The March to Finchley set out to demonstrate that a Protestant trading nation could produce a form of history painting free from the absolutist tendencies of European academicism. This essay argues that Hogarth's accomplishment was more thoroughgoing and intellectually rigorous than previously recognized, and that combined with the Analysis of Beauty (1753), it established a new agenda for ambitious art production. Through its manipulation of a domestic visual vocabulary, The March to Finchley transformed status consciousness into an inclusive artistic category and oppositional political rhetoric into a positive national identity. Comic history, as this new genre was called, offered a stable, yet flexible foundation for the emergence of a distinctively British school of art. That this school never came to fruition was largely because of a shift in Britain's political climate, and in particular, a rise in popular imperial enthusiasm brought about by the Seven Years' War. Douglas Fordham graduated from Yale University where he received the Frances Blanshard prize for an outstanding doctoral dissertation in the History of Art. He is currently a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University.