Discuss hogarth's 'gin lane' in relation to the idea of englishness
Answers
know no one who had a less pastoral imagination than Hogarth,” wrote the 19th Century essayist William Hazlitt. “He delights in the thick of St Giles’s or St James’s [in London]. His pictures breathe a certain close, greasy, tavern air.” For my money, there are few pithier descriptions of the work of the English painter and engraver William Hogarth (1697-1764).
Hogarth was rarely compelled to depict bubbling brooks or docile cows. Rather, his subject was the unruly theatre of life offered by society in London, from the slum of St Giles to fashionable St James’s. The 18th Century metropolis was a competitive arena – and Hogarth’s sense of its knockabout nature animated the series of satirical prints, including A Harlot’s Progress and A Rake’s Progress, which made his name.
Indeed, his vigorous, swarming, low-life scenes, set in brothels and other nefarious nooks of the city, proved so popular that they inspired an adjective – ‘Hogarthian’ – to evoke the shady milieu that they depict. And the quintessential example of Hogarth’s squalid subject matter is his infamous print of 1751, Gin Lane.
Hogarth’s print of 1751 depicts the spirit as a one-way street to ruin (Credit: Credit: Gin Lane/William Hogarth/Städel Museum – ARTHOTHEK)
Hogarth’s print of 1751 depicts the spirit as a one-way street to ruin (Credit: Gin Lane/William Hogarth/Städel Museum – ARTHOTHEK)
According to Hogarth, this urban hellscape was “calculated to reform some reigning Vices peculiar to the lower Class of People”. Along with its pendant, Beer Street, it is among 70 works on show in a new exhibition,
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