Hogarth, Place and Progress

A highly illustrated journey through Hogarth’s series paintings and engravings, from the blockbuster Rake’s Progress and Marriage a la Mode to the enigmatic and lesser known Happy Marriage this book offers a close analysis of place and setting in Hogarth’s works’ in order to revisit the artist’s complex stance on morality, society, and the city, and the enduring appeal of his satires in the present. William Hogarth (1697-1764) remains one of Britain’s best loved painters.

His most renowned works, the series relating to moral subjects, are rarely displayed together, and will be united at the Soane Museum for the first time in its history. The book also focusses tightly on Hogarth’s series; The Soane Museum’s own Rake’s Progress and An Election, as well as Marriage a la Mode, the Four Times of Day, as well as the three surviving paintings of The Happy Marriage engraved series such as Stages of Cruelty, Industry and Idleness and Gin Lane and Beer Street.

It is edited by David Bindman, a world authority on Hogarth and comprises four essays by leading academics, along with Bindman’s own introduction to each of the series according to the themes of ‘place’ and ‘progress’. Hogarth’s concept of ‘progress’ was influenced by John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, where the word described a journey towards moral and spiritual redemption.

Hogarth: Place and Progress will explore how Hogarth’s series explore as well a darker meaning of progress, with narratives that lead through moral abandon and social ostracism, to poverty, madness and death. Hogarth’s series present narratives with fully detailed characters, plots and changes of scene.

Precise locations in London play a key role in a moral reading of Hogarth’s paintings.

In A Rake’s Progress, the Rake moves from the City of London to an extravagant property in the west end, then a brothel in Covent Garden, and ultimately moves outside London, ending up in Bedlam, where his dissolute life has led him to insanity and death. The book will demonstrate how Hogarth’s ‘Modern Moral Subjects’ married the idea of progress with the moral geography of London, in a dynamic and evolving way throughout his own progress as an artist.